Windows died, and Acer didn't include my laptop with a CD Rom drive. I've been trying to boot the Backtrack iso from my Seagate external harddrive. I downloaded Win32DiskImager, and used it to write the Backtrack iso file onto the hard drive. Now when I try to go onto the external drive, it's not there. In disk manager it shows up as unallocated space...running disk recovery right now.

any help would be great!

Thanks!

What you have attempted is ingenious, but the disk driver is no doubt very surprised to see an ISO image. It would be better to get a USB stick and use Windiskimager to write the ISO. The USB driver is quite used to handling ISO.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

Backtrack is no longer maintained or supported and has been superseded by Kali. I do not remember Backtrack being a hybrid ISO and so Win32DiskImager does not work. You should get a flash drive so that you do not jeopardize losing data stored on the external drive.

Kali is not a general purpose distribution or for begineers.
http://docs.kali.org/introduction/sh...use-kali-linux

Thanks guys, I don't feel all that intelligent right now lol.

I'm downloading Kali right now, hopefully it will work better for me.

Honestly, the only option for me right now is this hard drive...I'd really love to figure out how to boot from it, but this time I'll create a partition beforehand, or maybe, if possible, empty the hard drive, which may be difficult.

any other ideas?

Lol thanks, but I don't feel like a genius.

I downloaded Kali, thanks for the tip! Hopefully it works better.

I managed to get all the important files safety onto my PC, and reformatted the drive.

This is actually the only option I have for external storage... any ideas on how to get this to work with what I have?

you are aware that there's a contradiction?
not saying one has to be a genius to use kali, but...

i didn't understand the question.
what option?
what storage?
what "this" do you need to "get to work"?

the usual way to install a linux distro is to create a bootable usb medium.

Well, like I said, I'm trying to install Linux using a external hard drive, instead of a USB drive.

I probably understand your situation because I was there before: facing an *Acer Netbook* --but it was luckily when I am already familiar with Gnu/Linux.

Using external hard drive is possible but I doubt if you can take the burden of making it like a bootable CD. Given that situation a simple nothing more nothing less, it will surely make the external HDD like handsome CD install image to boot into. But above code cannot be done inside your current Windows system. I don't know how to do it inside that obsolete-planet.

The easiest way for a newbie is to buy (or borrow an External CD) drive. Burn an ISO you like; boot -> F2 (or F9, or F10) to BIOS -> choose boot priority to external CD drive -> Install from CD.

Another way: use a USB stick with an ISO in it.

Caution: It is easier installing Linux in other brands, than an ACER netbook running Windows 10. For this reason I NEVER buy Acer anymore! Gnu/Linux installed straight among Toshiba, Lenovo and Dell (at least what I experienced). But Acer (as of 2016) has something in the BIOS that needed more time hacking-maneuver if only to install gnu/linux. (Sorry if unsolicited, but allow me to share this sad experience to help or warn newbies.)

Hope that helps. Good luck and enjoy.

m.m.

There is certainly no problem with copying the ISO to external drive, or mounting it under linux. The problem is that no BIOS is likely to support booting from a hard drive that contains an ISO image. There may be a way to convince grub to do it by adding a new grub.conf entry for your external disk:

Here is a past attempt to use grub, but it doesn't look successful.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-disk-294744/

FrozenPea123
i take it you are not arare that the Kali developers have the network DISABLED!!!!!!!! by default
kali is NOT a "general propose" operating system


you will fine it almost IMPOSSIBLE to use it for most things

WTF dose that mean?????
The iso is a hybrid image

there are NO!!!!! unimportant parts to a iso image !!!!!!

The OP wrote the Backtrack image to a USB external drive which overwrite the existing filesystem. The recovery was lost files that already existed on the drive. (At least how I understand the problem)

From the computers perspective there is no difference between an external hard drive (mechanical or Solid state) or a flash drive although it would seem silly since ISO installation images are small. A hybrid ISO image contains a MBR so it should boot from either device.

I have never used Win32DiskImager but it appears to just write an image file to disk. If the image file is not a hybrid in this case then it will not boot.

Again as others have stated Kali is not for beginners. Since your drive I assume is still empty since you had to reformat it you should be able to write a bootable ISO image like linux mint. Once installed you can reformat the external drive and use for storing data.

It was booting to Kali no problem, it just refused to install no matter what I did, just got a loop of errors.

That being said, I managed to find myself a USB drive, and installed it no problem.

Now, I'm having other problems with broken packages errors while installing programs, but I'll start a new topic on that.

Thanks everybody for all your help though!

Kali can ONLY@!!!!!!!!! use the default installed repos !!!
DO NOT!!!! install any third party software !!!!
it will break the tools in kali that make it what it is

Oh. Good to know. I was trying to use it for both

what? both what?