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Saturday, October 06, 2012

Backtrack 5r3 on Acer Aspire 4749z

Its actually rare that I have something to post on this blog.


I think I lost my fire for tech stuff, but recently I have to touch linux again, *hello olde buddy!*

Its more for security modules, but hey I am interested in forensics at a personal level so we might go the sleuth package. Who knows =)


Any ways it was kinda fortunate.


I almost had to dump a newly bought Acer Aspire 4749z

Its not the latest model but it was going for 699 SGD with a spec of 500 GB HDD 2.2 GHz Intel Core B960 64bit with 2 GB ram. It was the best value on the shelf (I did'nt really have time so I cannot afford to go multiple stores)

Compared to my trusty AXIOO Zetta, the Acer Aspire 4749z was a bit of a dissapointment. The Win7 was flawless (well until I use it more, if I do use it), but the Backtrack live CD could not boot!!!


At first I thought, it was the MD5 or the burning. But MD5 check passed and most damning: my AXIOO Zetta booted it with no complaints.

For the Acer Aspire 4749z, the boot CD will go to the menu, countdown by 3 (it should be 30) and then shutdown.

At first I thought it was the battery, but by some strange luck (dear God must be watching) I happen to press enter twice in quick succession (i.e. before the menu is fully up - but is on screen ... one way to see this is that the counter does not start counting down yet -- yes it was very lucky to hit upon this) and voila its alive!!!  I proceeded to try with and without the battery (as I really wanted to have backup power and it really did'nt make sense that the battery was causing the problem) and in the end I narrowed the problem down to the menu. Entering twice quickly (hence skipping the menu and countdown) did the trick, with or without the battery. And the battery was vindicated and my laptop saved from a fire sale.

Conclusion is both the Backtrack 5r3 live disc and Aspire 4749z are buggy here. =) I might continue to post. I just felt posting is important as apparently many people have issues and alas, it s mostly very version and hardware specific. I was looking for a solution in the boot options maybe, but in the end the solution that worked for me was something alot sillier.

As I write I am installing Backtrack 5r3 into the harddisk. I am attempting a dual boot. Lets hope it works.

I left the windows partition alone and luckily, half of the 500 GB is another HDD so it was left relatively virgin and untouched (it was ntfsed tho lol). I partitioned it as

 10 GB fat32
4 GB Swap
5 GB /boot
120 GB /
and about 90?? GB /home


I hope that works =)


and btw. To shutdown. The command is "shutdown now -h". You are welcome =)

[121006 12:37]




so fortunately GRUB works!!! W00T!

so I booted in!



And if you are like me a total N00B. You will get stuck at the login. Fortunately Google is *still* your friend. And this link came up! It actually provides ALOT more detail than my post so you might want to just skip over there =)

essentially, login as root and type toor and that will get you to the console.

After that type startx to get to the GUI =)

Have fun!!!

[121006 12:51]


So I am now testing the Win7 side of the family. On GRUB select the windows bootloader.

The Acer eRecovery dialog will come out.

I am currently wondering should I do the factory setting thing or to just boot from the windows.

The factory reset thing is fine as it is new and I haven't done anything yet. But I am worried that it will wipe my poor BT too! (though logically it should'nt).

In any case I decided not to since I can just boot windows through GRUB! =D and it still works!


Hooray!.

As an aside, filesystems are amazing. Windows now only sees the 10 GB fat32 space.... lol
[121006 12:57]

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