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Boot Linux or Backtrack 5 through USB on surface pro 2

rankitt

New Member
Hi,

I installed Backtrack 5 on usb and trying to boot on surface pro 2 but no luck, tried all the options like volume down button and advance startup but still it boots windows 8. I really appreciate if you guys can help me out.

Regards,
Rankitt
 

GoodBytes

Well-Known Member
You need to make the USB drive bootable, and in the UEFI menu of the Surface Pro 2, you need to disable Secure Boot
 
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rankitt

New Member
You need to make the USB drive bootable, and in the UEFI menu of the Surface Pro 2, you need to disable Secure Boot


Hi GoodBytes,

Thanks for your prompt reply I tried that but still no luck, I checked the USB drive on other laptop and works fine but not with Surface pro 2.

Regards,
Rankitt
 

GoodBytes

Well-Known Member
Does your Linux based OS that you are using support UEFI? It might only support the old legacy BIOS.
Check out Ubuntu, I think that one support UEFI based systems.
 

al2fast

New Member
Have you thought about running these different os's in a vm like virtual box? I have Ubuntu running on my sp2 and with the add ons for virtual box installed the screen scales to 1920x1080. I had a lot easier time with the network connection in virtual box as opposed to the vpro on the sp2. Vpro I found I had to use a static IP.

However with the vm the sp2 WiFi connection is just a lan connection to the host. I tried backtrack on my old Macbook in parallels and seeing as backtrack only recognized it as a wired lan couldn't do much of anything. You would need a USB WiFi adapter in a vm for it to see WiFi, in my experience. If you could get it to boot from USB then you should be good assuming you have drivers. I have booted other pcs from Ubuntu USB with fastboot disabled and uefi disabled as well, they were dells. Have not tried that on sp2 yet. The sp2 could make for a good wardriving machine!
 

jrapdx

Member
Have you thought about running these different os's in a vm like virtual box? I have Ubuntu running on my sp2 and with the add ons for virtual box installed the screen scales to 1920x1080. I had a lot easier time with the network connection in virtual box as opposed to the vpro on the sp2. Vpro I found I had to use a static IP.

However with the vm the sp2 WiFi connection is just a lan connection to the host. I tried backtrack on my old Macbook in parallels and seeing as backtrack only recognized it as a wired lan couldn't do much of anything. You would need a USB WiFi adapter in a vm for it to see WiFi, in my experience. If you could get it to boot from USB then you should be good assuming you have drivers. I have booted other pcs from Ubuntu USB with fastboot disabled and uefi disabled as well, they were dells. Have not tried that on sp2 yet. The sp2 could make for a good wardriving machine!

Interesting. When I bought my SP2 the plan was to dual boot a 2nd OS, FreeBSD or Linux. Back in December, the first SP2 I owned was damaged by the Dec FW Disaster, and in mid-January I exchanged it for the 2nd SP2. The upshot is I was leery of messing with the SP2 until I was sure it was working correctly.

Since it came with Hyper-V, I decided to try installing FBSD in a VM, conveniently FBSD 10.0 can be downloaded pre-installed in a VHD. With modest effort I was able to get the guest OS configured and connected to the internet, as well as accessible by the Windows 8.1 host--two virtual switches were necessary. Since the SP2 has only the one WiFi interface, a 2nd interface through a low-cost USB D-Link WiFi adapter provides the internet connection for the VM (FBSD interface gets a router-assigned DHCP address). The 2nd virtual switch requires a static IP to connect to Windows, but it is after all a local connection.

FBSD running in a Hyper-V VM makes a nice development platform for my purposes. Running my web server under FBSD, it can be accessed by the Windows web browser exactly in the same way as the real, remote server. The development system in the VM pushes source code to the remote platform through the DVCS used on both (fossil in this case). Essentially that's the main reason to setup dual-boot anyway; now I'm thinking I may not have to.
 
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