How to Backtrack 3 Fix – /dev/hda* not cleanly unmounted, check forced

/dev/hda1 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced

I had this problem after installing BT3. Every time I booted into BT3, I was faced with a forced check and then a second reboot. So off I went to http://forums.remote-exploit.org and came across THIS POST about the issue.

This is how I fixed the problem:
Become root:

su + password

Edit rc.6 with nano:

nano /etc/rc.d/rc.6

Scroll down to where it says:

# Kill all processes.
# INIT is supposed to handle this entirely now, but this didn’t always
# work correctly without this second pass at killing off the processes.
# Since INIT already notified the user that processes were being killed,
# we’ll avoid echoing this info this time around.
#TM: we need fuse-based filesystem to be alive (if mounted from #initrd).
#if [ ! "$1" = "fast" ]; then # shutdown did not already kill all processes
# /sbin/killall5 -15
# /bin/sleep 5
# /sbin/killall5 -9
#fi

And uncomment the lines from if to fi (delete the #’s)

It should now look like this:

# Kill all processes.
# INIT is supposed to handle this entirely now, but this didn’t always
# work correctly without this second pass at killing off the processes.
# Since INIT already notified the user that processes were being killed,
# we’ll avoid echoing this info this time around.
#TM: we need fuse-based filesystem to be alive (if mounted from initrd).
if [ ! "$1" = "fast" ]; then # shutdown did not already kill all processes
/sbin/killall5 -15
/bin/sleep 5
/sbin/killall5 -9
fi

Reboot, no more forced fsck, cake!

Thanks to _JMF_ at remote-exploit forums.

How to Add Backtrack 3 to Existing Grub

Dual-Boot Backtrack 3
Well, I have Backtrack 3 installed, and as you know, it uses Lilo, which to be honest I’m not all that keen on.

Using Grub from another distro
I reinstalled Dreamlinux 3.5 and chose “Install Grub to MBR”. So, back to Grub, but now I have to add Backtrack 3 which doesn’t have the initrd file in the /boot directory.

Adding Backtrack 3 to Menu List
No problem, just add these lines where “hda1″ is your Backtrack partition:

title Backtrack 3 Desktop
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz vga=791 root=/dev/hda1 ro autoexec=xconf;kdm
boot

title Backtrack 3 Console
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz vga=791 root=/dev/hda1 ro
boot

Now reboot and you should see those entries, and you should be able to boot into Backtrack 3 from Grub.

*note* Grub partition numbers
Remember that the Grub partition number will always be one less than the actual partition.
For example
hda1 is (hd0,0)
0 for the first harddrive, 0 as well for the first partition
hda2 would be (hd0,1)
hda3 would be (hd0,2) etc etc, always one number less.

What if you have a second harddrive?
hdb1 would be (hd1,0)
hdb2 would be (hd1,1) etc, etc, now the harddrives go up as well as the partitions.

There you go, easy.

How to Fix Backtrack 3 Slapt-Get package installer

The installed version of Backtrack 3 is missing some files which are needed to use slapt-get and the gslapt gui front-end package managers.

I had to go looking for the files but you can find them here:(right click “save as”)
1. gnupg-1.4.7-i486-1.tgz
2. gpgme-1.1.4-i486-1.tgz
3. libassuan-1.0.1-i486-1.tgz

Once they have all been downloaded to your home directory, issue these commands to install each package one by one.

installpkg gnupg-1.4.7-i486-1.tgz

installpkg gpgme-1.1.4-i486-1.tgz

installpkg libassuan-1.0.1-i486-1.tgz

Once you have installed all of them you should be able to use slapt-get, so start by updating the package cache and then upgrade the system:

slapt-get --update

slapt-get --upgrade

You are now ready to install whatever you need from the repos. I’ll talk about the different repositories in another post. Poople who are accustomed to Debian’s 18,000 packages seem to believe that Slackware doesn’t have access to all those lovely applications. Wrong! There are are loads of repos and Slackware package builds of practically every major/known software applications, including Desktop Environments. But i’ll save that for later.