Hey everyone, first post here.
Ive been dwelling around the net trying to solve my problem of not getting my NIC card working on BackTrack5.
Im currently running BT5 off of a flash drive (not the best option I know) and most posts trying to solve the issue were with regards to people running BT5 off of virtual machines.
The card is the Intel Centrino-N 1030.
"airmon-ng" does not pick the card up (leaves the interface and everything else black)and "iwconfig" says the same.

Ive been struggling for days on end and desperate to get it working. My thanks go in advance.

That card is fully supported for kernels 2.6.24 and later. There are source files you can compile the driver if the kernel you have is older.

See this link-->http://www.intellinuxwireless.org/

You also need the firmware loaded before the card will work. The kernel loadable module ( driver ) is called 'iwlwifi'.