Anyone have BackTrack2 installed on Parallels?

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop for Mac' started by vtek63, Mar 16, 2007.

  1. vtek63

    vtek63 Bit poster

    Messages:
    5
    Does anyone have Backtrack2 installed on Parallels?

    I just tried installing it on a virtual harddrive and everything went smoothly and as it should, but when it tries to boot from the virtual harddrive, it just gets stuck at "Booting from hard drive..."

    When i boot from the Backtrack iso, it can see the drives fine (/dev/hda1, etc..) and all the data on it, but it won't boot.

    anyone?

    Thanks!
     
  2. yeti.man

    yeti.man Bit poster

    Messages:
    7
    I have had it installed a couple of days, and am a little disappointed.

    I wanted to use it for wireless security and had heard that the usb support for wireless drivers was good (even in parallels). But, it really isn't. I can get my usb dongle recognized, but as soon as I drop to monitor mode and run one of the tools (kismet, airodump, etc) i get a kernel panic and the system inside the vm crashes.

    I thought I might have a bad dongle, so I booted off the cd so that backtrack could have full access to the hardware and it worked fine. (My conclusion is that bt2 doesn't like the virtual machine, at least with my network dongle...)

    I haven't tried the other tools because I have been so concentrated on getting wireless working.

    (More hints... The built in apple wireless won't work: no monitor mode drivers. I also tried to run bt2 under the beta of vmware and had the same experience. I tried downloading and recompiling my dongle drivers with the same results.)

    I'm running a linksys wusb54gc dongle. Thinking about taking it back and picking up a netgear dongle. (netgear uses a different driver so maybe I can go that route...)

    Anyone else want to comment? Anyone tried recompiling the kernel?
     
  3. vtek63

    vtek63 Bit poster

    Messages:
    5
    yeti.man, did you have to do anything special to get it installed under parallels or just the standard install? mine just won't come up. cdboot works fine though.

    did you try setting the networking option in parallels to bridged or host?
     
  4. yeti.man

    yeti.man Bit poster

    Messages:
    7
    I had to install it manually. I am working on a how-to right now and hope to have it done in a day or so. the automatic install didn't work for me for some reason (you have to establish and format your partitions and set up lilo (at least that is what I am trying as we speak).

    I completely disconnected and deleted any reference to networking in the virtual machine settings. Again, I am trying to work on wireless. If you set up networking in the virtual machine, bt will see it as a wired network connector.
     
  5. yeti.man

    yeti.man Bit poster

    Messages:
    7
    As a follow up, I was able to get things going in vmware's beta yesterday without a kernel panic. I had kismet and airodump working for over an hour each with no bad results. in fact everything worked fine. I switched back to parallels and followed my exact steps and got a kernel panic very quickly. i can only guess that parallels doesn't like the attempts to address the hardware directly (which in some cases is good :) )

    I tried the various cpu switches in the vm setup under parallels to no success, as well. (If anyone from parallels is listening... :D
     
  6. yeti.man

    yeti.man Bit poster

    Messages:
    7
    After many frustrating hours of trying to get wireless working in a virtual machine, I have officially surrendered! On one boot, I could get it working (only in vmware fusion) quite well, and on another boot, it would immediately crash with the same settings.

    To answer your questions about setting it up in parallels, I found this video:

    https://www.offensive-security.com/movies/dualboot/dualboot.html

    All the same steps apply, but you MUST replace the hard drive partition assignments with your own (i.e. hda1 should be boot, hda2 should be swap, and hda3 should be / ). Also, you won't need to edit the lilo.conf file as extensively as the presenter because you won't be dual booting. You also won't need to resize a partition with qparted.

    Good luck and happy hacking....
     
  7. bigmat78

    bigmat78 Bit poster

    Messages:
    1
    hey yeti.man,

    there's a nice how-to here
     
  8. yeti.man

    yeti.man Bit poster

    Messages:
    7
    Thanks for the link, but I actually found that when I was trying to get it installed. It never worked for me. I had to manually install BackTrack (avoiding the GUI installer).
     

Share This Page