Greetings everyone, I have successfully installed backtrack 2 to my harddrive in a dual boot with windows XP. I have ran into my first problem with backtrack 2, I cannot get the USB to recognize my flash drive when I plug it in. I plug the flash drive into the USB port, and nothing happens. I have researched quite a bit and even asked some linux friends if they had any ideas, but so far we have come up short. I have an HP Pavilion dv9000 laptop.

Here is what I have tried.

tail -f /var/log/messages
Then I plug in / out the USB drive and get no output as far as to what the system would be calling my flash drive.

lspci
I have tried this command and I get ~zero~ output. This seemed weird to one person, he tried it on his laptop and got a ton of data output.

dmesg
lots of output but I could not see anything that resembled a "usb" listing like shown here . I even edited my lilo.conf in hopes that the fix for that user would fix mine, but it didnt. I had added append="acpi=noirq" to lilo.conf

lsusb
Again, no output with this command

I cannot seem to find out what exactly my computer is "labeling" my flash drive. If I knew that, I could mount it. I have tried /dev/sda1 and many others. My friend with his dell laptop seemed to have it easy, backtrack 2 labeled his /dev/sda1.

Thank you in advance for any help!

That either means your chipset is not supported, or you have a serious bug in your kernel.

if it is a serious bug in the kernel, would getting a different iso to install or should i just try to reinstall it again to fix the issue?

does your kernel have usb support ? Also have a look if you have modules for usb compiled along with your kernel. should be somewhere in /lib/modules/<your_kernel>.

also try:
mount usb in linux

I would try a different LiveCD first. If you can boot an Ubuntu Install CD and see output from "lspci" and "lsusb", you will know your installation has a serious problem.

After that, you can re-install BackTrack and see if things improve. If they don't, you can then try another distro, or you could seek help from the BackTrack folks. It may be a known issue with their distro.

[OFFTOPIC]
Yeah.. I don't know about asking anything at the backtrack forum.. I once asked something very legitimate at their forums and they all laughed at me.
I had seen a really nice looking "program" (I didn't know what is was) that displayed statistics, network usage, cpu usage and so on. So I downloaded the whole thing, ran it and couldn't figure out what it was:-/
So I asked at their forums, and after being called n00b, dumb, and so on in a few posts, someone actually answered the question (all after pretending not to understand it). It was a plain Karamba widget (rather childish really, and using LOTS of resources).
So, be prepared if you go at their forum. Cheers.

Well thanks for the info so far, appreciate it a lot. I am going to try a different cd and if that doesnt work I will try other options I guess. I loaded the ubuntu 7.1 live cd and did a lspci and got a lot of output, so its definately something with my install I am guessing.

That is a very bad sign for your BackTrack installation. Just for grins and giggles, what does "uname -a" show in BackTrack?

The output from this command was:

Linux bt 2.6.20-BT-PwnSauce-NOSMP #3 Sat Feb 24 15:52:59 GMT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux