Installing Windows After Linux!

Hello, this time I am gonna try a different type of post. I am not gonna give any in-depth-details about the commands and stuff but rather share my experience to dual boot as installing Linux first and Windows after. First of all let me give you the configuration I have so you could judge it if you should try below steps in such operation if it suits you anyhow...

I had a single hard disk in my laptop as single partitioned (ext4) 500GB for Kali with latest updates, everything is working right, no problem in anyway. It is a very healthy system, but I will never ever never trust my NTFS formatted archive external disks with any version of Linux or Mac or anyother OS if that matters. I will never use those disk under any circumstances on other operating systems except Microsoft ones as their content is invaluable, years of backups, works, codes, datas, you know my digital life. I lost my other machine to a hardware failure and so I also wanted to have a Windows 8.1 preview version as my second OS on this machine. I downloaded from the official Microsoft site and the risky operation series has begun. I strongly suggest you to take backups before try anything. In fact don't try this at all, these are only my experiences I decided to share.

I will try to write the steps I followed in bullets, give commands or links if necessary along the way;

• Downloaded the Windows 8.1 preview iso from the official site. Just do a Bing search for it you'll quickly find it. Or click "w", I am annoying =P
• Made the iso a bootable flash drive. There are innumerable guides out there, just Bing it, or Google it.
• After that I booted my system with Kali live usb stick, and used gparted to shrink my single partition's size by 190GB, that is how much space I wanted for my Windows 8.1 Preview. Decide and shrink your partition with your live Linux USB, I believe any modern live stick will do job. {I somehow couldn't manage without this second live Linux usb stick there are guides to shrink a partition but I couldn't do it.}
• Then I booted into Windows install stick (I think you can use any version but for the sake of my experience I will assume you are using also 8.1 preview) and installed my 8.1 preview to that newly emptied free unallocated space. after installation it looked like this =>here sda1 is my Kali, sda2 (the small area between sda1 and sda3) Windows boot partition, sda3 is Win8.1Pre, last part is linux swap.
• But at this point I was cut off of from my Linux. No way to boot into. Stuck with Windows, I followed this guide I found. I know it is in Italian, I don't know any Italian. You could simply follow the commands or have Bing translate the page for you.
• And now I am stuck with only Kali, but now I had Windows installed over my disk somewhere. I just cannot boot into it. That's I figured pretty good, and thought can be a very manageable situation. But once again for the sake of the completeness of my whole experience I am gonna write the misssteps I took. In italic don't do them, just read them and go to the next bullet.
1. I booted into my Windows Install USB stick and try to recover MBR there. I succeeded with some commands from the prompt like bootsect and stuff, but that got me stuck with only Windows once again.
2. Then I re-recovered my grub from the guide above I linked, then again I was stuck with only Kali, with Windows over there unreachable.
3. I tried old distros' with the option "boot the first partition" live CDs. Nothing worked, for a time I had a very healthy Kali and an unreachable Windows.
4. Then I try some other guides I found, involving bunch of grub config file editing and grub-updates etc... those only worsen the situation. I decided the safest way to achieve my goal is to have Kali and making the whatever it is going to take manually
• Then I started to play with /boot/grub/grub.cfg file.
• After some trial and error, these below lines worked for me.
• menuentry 'win'{
  set root=(hd0,2)
  chainloader +1
  }
• I added above entry to the file mentioned above completely manually to the appropriate place. If you are following this then take a look at the file, examine it carefully and edit it accordingly.
1. using grub.d/xx_win stuff (I mention this because chances are good you are gonna find such guides involving that online pretty easily, they didn't work for me) messes my configuration and makes me to start to recover the grub process all over again and again.
• That's it; now I have dual boot.

I am guessing I took a very rocky and long way to have a dual boot system, but you may be in my shoes and need some light. Therefore my post may help to your cause. Have a nice journey and dual boot.

Remember don't follow this post to have dual boot. It may only help if you are nearly exactly in my situation to begin with. There are, I believe, tons of easier and safer ways to have dual boot in the first place.

VirtualBox on Kali Linux, How To?

It's been ages since I write anything, but it was constantly in my mind that I was reminding myself "c'mon Ozgur you should write something on your blog, you have a blog. Write!"

Now is the time, it'll be a very quick step-by-step.

Recently my new hobby is testing pentest distros. Of course along the way I know now some of my neighbours Wi-Fi passwords. After testing and trying out versions and configurations and drivers and CUDA and some other stuff, I think I am gonna settle on either Kali or WeakNetLabs. I can make Ubuntu an OK degree pentest distro as best of my abilities also, but I claimed it impossible to enable CUDA with my hardware. It will simply not be happening. I tried everything I know and can be found on forums and stuff. It will not work. So I continued...

WNL comes with CUDA 5.0 and pretty recent and decent Nvidia drivers out of box but I have some little other issues I first need to fix so it will take another post to go that way.

On the other hand, Kali is playing well with my hardware if I use Cuda 4.x and old Nvidia drivers. Which, frankly, I am ok with. Normally I update everything to the latest but in this case I will make an exception since it is really too hard to get it done everything correctly for me (which I mean WPA cracking via CUDA =P ).

Back to the guide; I will try to give you little heads up before you use Kali as a host for VirtualBox images. I will assume you login as root and since it is a pentest distro you should be familiar with most of the stuff already.

apt-get update

if you have still 2 or 3 lines of  sources.list after this, it is a good time to find an appropriate sources.list for your distro which Kali I hope not BackTrack.

apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

this should update 20 to 60 mbs if not it is probably because of the sources.list is not rich enough. You may get some errors like cannot locate 37-trunk-amd64 or such with header update, but it is a matter of fixing the sources.list really.

after that we should head to the https://www.virtualbox.org and press downloads. You should see the version and platforms. Find and click
VirtualBox 4.x.yz for Linux hosts on. You will not see anything close to our distro. But you can very easily locate the last one;
All distributions choose your platform, either 32 or 64 bits. Download the file, I am assuming you download it to the ~/Downloads/. Following finishing download make the file executable with chmod and then run it.

chmod +x VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

./VirtualBox-4.2.16-86992-Linux_amd64.run

what you should see if everything goes right is;

 Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing VirtualBox for Linux installation............
VirtualBox Version 4.2.16 r86992 (2013-07-04T14:33:09Z) installer
Installing VirtualBox to /opt/VirtualBox
Python found: python, installing bindings...
Building the VirtualBox kernel modules

VirtualBox has been installed successfully.

You will find useful information about using VirtualBox in the user manual
  /opt/VirtualBox/UserManual.pdf
and in the user FAQ
  http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/User_FAQ

We hope that you enjoy using VirtualBox.

after that type and go the default installation directory;

cd /opt/VirtualBox/

get a list there. You will see a VirtualBox executable righted file. Run it directly from the console.

VirtualBox

Voilà!

There you have your VirtualBox on Kali.

I tried also XP on it and it worked just as fine without any hassle. It's a good setting now. CUDA to crack and i3 CPU - 8GB ram to play with.

Enjoy. Next time I will write about qbittorrent application and its nicest settings I figured out for Kali or maybe on WeakNetLabs.

Windows 8 (M3) On 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V!

This may look like a complex title but it is so. I am just trying out Windows 8 leaked build on a Hyper-V VM of a 180 days trial version of MS Windows 2008 R2 SP1 Enterprise Server.

Let me just show you some pictures...

This one is the moments away from finishing the installation.

This is when I'm done with user and first use settings.

I changed that wallpaper ("shh let's not leak our hard work" thingie) so you can read that text (build 7989 winmain thing and the disciplinary note), and my trial 2008 Server.

So, now I am gonna try to install Internet Explorer 10 Developer Preview. Strangely Windows 8 (Build 7989 Milestone 3) came with IE version 9. I understand that there is "Windows 7 Ultimate" text everywhere on this very early preview version, but why IE9? IE10 will most certainly be completed (and already released in some form) and bundled with Windows 8. So why not include the IE10 beta even now in this leak? May it be 'cause they want it (this Windows 8 version) as stable as possible, therefore avoid unnecessary beta utilities? It can't, because it is not supposed to leak?! or maybe... hmm.

A little surprise, by the way, came with Windows 8, IIS 8! There it is;

Click on it for full size image.

Internet Information Services version 8, in other saying IIS 8, is or will be ready with Windows 8 Family (server and desktop editions) and armed with something they called Smooth Streaming.


UPDATE: I tried IE 10 Platform Preview 2. It works very smooth and fast, I am impressed. Really, It was good.

Also, last time when I write this post, I forgot to take the picture of Microsoft Beta Fish so here it goes ^ .

Windows 7 Performs Better Than I Expected

Hello all, today I want to write about my Windows 7 experience. I have been using it for 7 days now, and collecting data in order to write about it.

I was a Ubuntu user as I said it earlier cause I am in war with piracy personally. I do not pirate anything under any circumstances. Since I am not so rich. I am trying to avoid licensed stuff and stick with share and free ware whenever I can.

Back to business, when my Ubuntu last died, I was trying to install OpenLDAP so I can get some idea first and then decide to use it at work in development environment. Yeah, Yeah I had free time to try it out at home, that wa my mistake. Anyways Ubuntu died and I had no OS CD or DVD at that time except that MS sent Windows 7 RC 7100.

Since Ubuntu died completely at that time I had no internet connection to download anything to recover it or fix it or etc... I hopelessly put the 7100 dvd in. And my trip began.

It was a wonderfully fast installation. Under 20 minutes, and at that point I'll give my computers specifications. But under 20 minutes? wait a minute! Here goes specifications;

• Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Prescott [800 MHz bus]
• 1 GB ram [DDR 400 mhz]
• 160 GB SATA HDD
• ATI x1650

Installation ended in under 20 minutes, I was not impressed but shocked! Because last time I installed a windows on this computer it was an XP SP2 and it took twice that!

Yeah Installation ended anyway, It was a disaster from a point of finding the appropriate drivers. I had no internet connection cause it missed my NIC. I found the drivers that took my 3 minutes or so [yes I am going to count this time as setup time, at the end it was Windows' fault]. I showed the drivers. and excatly like another 3 minutes. It installed all my other drivers, including on board sound card, ATI, some other drivers that belongs to mainboard. Cause as soon as it gets the internet connection there wa appropriate drivers installed and Windowsgot updated too. So yeah it was a clear 26 minutes update. And under 30 minutes I installed the DivX codecs and start to watch movies on my LCD TV.

Along the whole week I noticed Windows is abruptly responsive on my old very old system. I am clicking on something and BAM! It is there, so fast so responsive. You know what it is even shocky that it does whole this with no HDD noise. After this week; I decided to give it a longer term chance, I found my original MS Office 2007 Home and Student Ed. installed it, give this old timer 2 GB more ram [It is now a 3GB machine with practically wings]. It is working like a magic. Looks everything right for the moment we'll see, who knows maybe this RC expired I buy a Windows 7? not go back to free Ubuntu or buy a Mac Mini? Who knows?

PS: Death To Software Piracy! I am living a true developer dream! Everything I am using is licensed or free of charge! YAY!

Chrome OS

It's been rather an exciting week so far. Google officially announced Chrome OS, which got me excited because I never pirate. For instance, I am using Windows only when MS sends an RC copy or something. Other times Ubuntu works for me.

You know at home, I am only using my computer for surfing and watching TV Series such as sitcoms etc. So Ubuntu is pretty much whatever I ask at the moment, but as I always say, if I ever become non-cheap, I'll buy a Mac. This is also because the actual Total-Cost-Of-Ownership wise, Mac is the cheapest system out there. You don't give much time to troubleshoot. Like you do with Ubuntu. You don't pay an overprice check for the Macos. Like you do with MS-Windows.

These are the reasons why I am excited for a new OS announced by Google. It'll be definetely free, and It'll be hopefully doing whatever I need at home. I think this is what I have to say about Chrome OS for now, you can check some details on this good blog here.

So, wassup on the MS side? I am hearing there is a very very majorly big major announcement coming over on Monday. I am anxious to know what it is. My tiny guess is something to do with Silverlight, which I adore nowadays. But we'll see on Monday. I need to be patient.

Till then I'll probably write somethings from the gaming world, there are some major announcements there too this week also.

Peace!