Trouble installing Backtrack 5 r2 KDE as single OS on fully encrypted disc.

[helpmonkey]

I have googled every, and searched far beyond the realms of space. One such article that I found on this forum got me very close yet when I went to enter the 'echo" command line I got no results and even after tying to move through the other steps was able to get partitions to set up from the help of an fully encrypted USB tutorial using lvm. I have yet another walkthrough which is installing bt5 encrypted along side Widows 7, however I do not wish to use windows at all. I 64bit computer, an i5 processor, and 1 tb of HDD. I really am very impressed with this distro and would like to be able to encrypt all actions and as much of my personal data as possible. It just seems like I get really close, as in into the intsall disk with the part of manually section of the partion set up. From there using the root commands to partition the disks has led me to the same attempted set up of a dual boot with Windows 7. Please if anyone has a simple step by step walkthrough that I can load onto my other computer and navigate easily through you would of helped me so much as to having no idea. I love this OS, I have tried numerous Linux distros, but the BT5R2 KDE is by far my choice by far. One of the walkthroughs I used was at. http://www.mathyvanhoef.com/2011/08/...boot-with.html I liked the easier idea of using gparted to set things up, but there is still issues in final execution that either I'm not full getting, using improper command lines, or possible an old walkthrough. Thank you so much for any help in getting this task completed. I will share any help that I can for any new users as well. Just really want to get this tackled. It's been 2weeks of digging all over the web to get close but not there. Thanks again.

[helpmonkey]

Last post was rather vague my appologies. Using this guide http://www.edwiget.name/2011/11/admi...to-hard-drive/ I was able to get pretty far. I was able to create the partions and physically see them with gparted. I had i believe one dev/mapper which apeared to be mapped as the /dev/sda base of the tree. (I'm going off memory I'm at work currently.) vg-root which had ext4 mounted to / and under 1tb. and the other ext that was 583 or so MB's in size that was as instructed mounted as /boot. I could also see the outer volume of /dev/sda5, so I figured I had that part right.

To encyrpt the partition I used code : cryptsetup -y -c aes-xts-plain -s 512 luksFormat /dev/sda5


The commands I used for mapping where:

pvcreate /dev/mapper/pvcrypt
vgcreate vg /dev/mapper/pvcrypt
lvcreate -n root -l 100%FREE vg

Followed by: mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/vg-root

That worked and it synced my files.

In case I made a mistake I altered the mounts of / and /boot to the partitions with space on them. I made sure my grub was placed in /dev/sda and hit forward as that install instructed. I bypassed the swap space. The installation started and there was no problems.

Then I did as instructed and selected to continue to test.

This is where i first started noticing problems. When I tried to execute this set of commands:

mkdir /mnt/bt
mount /dev/mapper/vg-root /mnt/bt
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/bt/boot
chroot /mnt/bt
mount -t proc proc /proc
mount -t sysfs sys /sys

I was given an error or nothing displayed it just went back to root@bt# or whatever it is. I was given an error on mkdir /mnt/bt not being found. I ran: sh NV<tab>mkdir and it showed a list of things such as .gconf and .gconfd as wells as Desktop/ but there was no mnt/. running the mount commands as I mentioned earlier put me right back at root@bt#. I didn't see that it had any signs of life unless it doesn't have to display. I went through the other commands any way got an error on chroot/mnt/bt and I think the last to mount commands ran. (I entered the commands exactly as they are above ^ this paragraph.

I then did the apt-get update and the apt-get install hashalotlvm2 commands and for my choice I also did a apt-get install gedit command. I added the line with my UUID, and there was nothing other than what appears to be what the guide suggests. There was a UUID string list before /boot, but from the instructions it looked that that was to be left alone. So I had to make no changes. The dev/mapper line was there. I finished through the tutorial and tried to: update-initramfs -u I got an error there about Nothing being there in kernel shell or something along that line and "Failed" and well it didn't take the grub.

Hopefully that helps you better understand the nature of my question and what parts I need help with. Thank you.

[applekid]

I, too, am having similar difficulties. I have reviewed the old infosecramblings tutorial but am still having difficulties. At this point, my problems relate to using a partitioning application outside of the BackTrack installer to partition the drive, which always results in a misalignment that the installer will NOT pass through (I am given the option to 'Continue' after the warning, but doing so never allows me to progress through the installer).

The issue with the thumb drive install is that it provides no instructions for setting up swap space. As far as I'm aware, I'll need swap space for my static HDD, and the problem with adding swap space to the instructions is that I'm unsure which steps need to be taken to secure the swap partition as well. Do I simply apply the instructions in the tutorial twice over? This comes from a lack of understanding of how crypto in Linux works, how the LVM needs to be setup, etc. Trying to cobble together steps from a few different tutorials (some non-BT-specific) hasn't yielded much. Today, I plan to try PGP Whole Disk Encryption and see how that gets me, but I would really love to find a tutorial regarding a single-OS install with WDE.

[applekid]

A quick follow up: I was able to get encryption working on a standalone disk-install of BT5r3 using this tutorial: http://www.edwiget.name/2011/11/admi...to-hard-drive/

I had to utilize fdisk for partitioning using these steps: http://eric.gavaletz.com/2012/03/par...k-sectors.html

I also decided to leave 10GB free on my disk and basically end the partition's logical boundary 10G short of where it should have. I'm not sure if that did the trick, or if it was the flags used when starting fdisk above that made the difference in getting through the BT5 installer, nor do I have time to go back and test to see which it was.

There are a few places where, it seemed, I "fell out of" the chrooted environment later in the walkthrough. Always check the contents of your fstab and cryptab in /mnt/root/whatever to make sure you wrote the modifications to the right place. That's ultimately the environment that will be used, so it only matters that the changes are done there. If you get errors about certain devices being busy or being loaded, just start the chrooting process over again. I had to do that once and it didn't seem to have any problem. Good luck.

[applekid]

My apologies for the spam. This was the resource I used, not the one at edwiget.name: http://blog.markloiseau.com/2012/05/...s-xts-plain64/

It's for Ubuntu, but after reading that another visitor had confirmed working on BTr3, I tried it. The results were positive.