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.


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