Hello, I have been trying to boot backtrack on a live DVD and a USB for the past couple weeks. The .iso file I have been using works fine, as I can make a virtual machine with it.

Whenever I boot from my USB or from the Live CD, it runs all the way to the point where you have to type in "startx" to login to the OS.

After "startx" is run, it begins running scripts, and then the screen turns black and nothing else happens.

I am using a Dell Inspiron N7010 laptop with 4GB of RAM.

I have searched and found many threads with this related problem, but none of their solutions helped with my situation.

Hello and welcome to LQ.

Since this seems to be a graphics problem it would be nice to know which graphics hardware that machine is using.

Sidenote: If you aren't a network and security expert Backtrack may possibly not be the right distribution for you, since that is the intended audience for that distro. In that case it may be easier to start with a more beginner friendly distribution, like Mint, Mepis or Ubuntu.

Hey, thanks for the response.

I have a integrated Intel HD Graphics. Backtrack works perfectly in a virtual machine, as stated before, but a full boot does not work.

Also, I am a network security student, and I use backtrack daily for a lot of my classes.

There really seems to be some trouble with the integrated Intel graphics and Backtrack. It may help to set up a xorg.conf file with the correct parameters with your hardware, but it may be better to just use it in a virtual machine for the time being and wait for a new release of Backtrack.
You may also want to try a different distro aimed at security and network experts, like Pentoo or BackBox Linux.