Now, I don’t mind booting off of a flash drive that has BackTrack installed on it via unetbootin , but having the ability to triple boot between 3 operating systems via grub was just too tempting.

Keep in mind that most guides suggest to install Windows XP, then Backtrack and finally Ubuntu. This is the simple way and a lot less hassle, but my guide is geared towards individuals like myself who’ve installed Windows and Ubuntu and then, finally decided they wanted to install BackTrack.

The first task that I needed to do was, to make an empty partition on my laptop’s hard drive. I decided to shrink my Windows XP partition even more via a wonderful too called: Easeus Partition manager.

http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm

I shrank down my Windows XP partition so I would have an empty partition of about 17 gigs for BackTrack 4.

Doing this, changed my partition numbers under Ubuntu, so I had to change my partition number for Ubuntu under menu.lst. Without doing this, grub loader could not find the necessary files to boot Ubuntu. (If you’re wondering how I did this, you can change boot settings on the fly with grub, by invoking ‘e’ at the boot menu.)

I then followed this guide pretty closely:
http://forums.remote-exploit.org/bt4beta-howtos/20205-dual-tri-boot-grub.html

Here is the text-only cached version from google:
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:http://forums.remote-exploit.org/bt4beta-howtos/20205-dual-tri-boot-grub.html&hl=en&strip=1

(Hopefully this link works, because recently I’ve noticed that the remote-exploit forums have been inaccessible.)

This guide got me to the point where, I had everything copied over that was necessary for BackTrack 4 to run. However, the suggested method for modifying my menu.lst for BackTrack 4 was not quite what I expected.

For BackTrack 4 to boot for me from the grub boot loader, I had to make my menu.lst entry look like this:

title           Backtrack 4 Final
root            (hd0,4)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.9 rw root=/dev/hda5
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.30.9
boot

Now, your hd location will most likely be different, but the point I’m trying to make here, is that the kernel and initrd settings are completely different from what the guide suggested in the forum.

After making these changes, I was able to get into BackTrack 4, but there were more problems to come!

==========================================================

I own a Gateway MT3707, which for it’s WLAN card, it has a Realtek RTL8185 wifi card. I haven’t had much luck with getting it to work with the Linux drivers in the past, so I’ve resorted to ndiswrapper.

BackTrack did have some drivers for my wifi card, but they didn’t work what so ever. So, I did give ndiswrapper a try but it did not work.

This is what worked for me:

Firstly, edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add: blacklist r8187, blacklist r8180 and blacklist ndiswrapper .

Secondly, with an ethernet cable attached to my laptop, I downloaded the drivers from Realtek, which are for Linux.

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsview.aspx?langid=1&pnid=1&pfid=1&level=6&conn=5&downtypeid=3&getdown=false&downloads=true

Again, in the past these drivers haven’t worked for me, but Realtek was kind enough to update them.

After following the directions and rebooting, I thought I was on my way to getting on my wireless network. Lo and behold, ..no this wasn’t true.

By doing:

iwlist wlan0 scan

I was getting a weird permissions error, which was odd because I was root. So, just for the fun of it I tried using dhclient.

dhclient wlan0

I then, received NO DHCP Leases (basically I couldn’t get an IP address). Using iwlist again just for a last resort, I did get results and no errors (which was quite weird).

After setting my essid via iwconfig, I was finally able to get onto my network!

At a later time, I booted back into BackTrack 4 and tried getting back on to my network. Yet again, I was getting the same permissions error when I used iwlist and then it would lead to no results. The only odd way to mend this was to run dhclient first and then use iwlist to look for wifi networks.

To make a weird fix for this, I added this file to /etc/init.d/ :

(Name fixme)

#!/bin/bash

dhclient wlan0 &> /dev/null &
sleep 3.5;
kill $(ps -A | grep dhclient | awk '{print $1}' | head -n1);
exit 0;

Make this file executable by using chmod and then use sysv-rc-conf (or chkconfig if you want) to make sure that it runs at the following levels (which worked for me): 2, 3, 4, 5 and S.

This will run dhclient in the erroneous way for you and then kill it, that way you’ll be able to use iwlist to view your networks. I honestly think this has the affect of the ‘pump’ command.

Lastly, I should note, that for my wifi card to work in BackTrack 4, I can’t reboot from another operating system into BackTrack 4 and have it work. I have to totally power off my laptop and then boot into BackTrack 4 and then my wifi card will work. This was kind of a pain. I hope this helps some one.

More to come.