Cybertalk - EP6 - Don't Dual Boot

Key Takeaways

hey guys hackersploit here back again with another video and in this video i'm just going to be answering a question that i think is probably one of the most popular questions that you you get on a day-to-day basis especially from students and that is the whole process or concept of dual booting a windows operating system and a linux operating system right so first of all let me just break it down really simply for you dual booting especially in this context is where you have windows and linux running on the same drive with their own bootloaders essentially and typically for windows you know we have the windows boot load and then for linux you have grub handling everything and um this was really a technique that was that is being used quite a while ago and um i don't think anyone even uses it today because of how cumbersome it is and how how messy things can get really quickly so let me just take you through the history of of dual booting and why it was it was done specifically so the thing you need to understand firstly is that dual booting was primarily done by students who wanted to test out these uh penetration testing distributions at the time the only one that i could remember was backtrack and dual booting was more popular for ubuntu right so i'll explain this in a second and that's because ubuntu actually pushed this uh this whole technique of dual booting uh quite quite far actually they allowed you to to perform half the install on windows and then after you restart it would then allow it would actually boot into ubuntu and then you're able to complete the installation there so they were actually kind of pioneers in this in in terms of making it accessible to the masses which i think this is where the problems began right so as i said students were typically trying to run backtrack and then ubuntu right and the reason they were doing this was very simple a their computers did not support virtualization that was quite common at the time i remembered this being done around the time windows vista windows 7. so i think vista failed and it was really a buggy mess and then windows 7 came i can't remember the actual date and that was really really cool and then of course this is when all of this experimentation began and at the time many computers or many of the computers that students were running were quite old they didn't support virtualization and secondly they had uh you know computers with modest system resources things like uh you know computers that had two gigs of ram and that was and that was pretty standard at the time as most of you know the the whole 8 gb or 8 gigabytes of ram uh meme has only just become common as i think as of 2016 or 17 and 8 gigs is is still quite a bit of ram uh and i i can i can actually use a system with eight gigs without any issue right um so so that those were the two reasons as to why students would typically want to dual boot because they were so excited to test out the distribution but there's no way they could virtualize it or there wasn't any other way they could experience it they had one computer and they essentially had to use this computer you know for school work and they wanted to test it out and the safest way of preserving windows uh where they would have their you know their their elementary programs like microsoft office that they were using typically and linux was through dual booting so they would essentially go through the process and i remember there were many guides by some of the ogs of the community where they would actually show you how to do it on backtrack and backtrack had an issue i remember with with the bootloader where it would actually mess up windows um i think it was windows 7 service pack one or two i don't really remember but it used to cause an issue with the master boot record and um i knew a lot of friends who actually ran through ran into that problem and they really weren't able to do to actually sort out their their windows install again and that brings me to my second major point is um the problem with with uh dual booting is you're installing two boot loaders uh on on the same disk right now this uh this may not be uh it may not be common right now but again i know many individuals like myself who have a drive for each operating system that they're using right so you have about six drives and one of them has debian ubuntu arch windows and so you really just plug and play in terms of what you need that's not dual booting right dual booting essentially having uh you know two boot loaders on the same drive right and um typically grub will use up the windows boot loader and then through grub you can specify uh whether or not you want to boot into the linux distribution or whether or not you want to boot into the windows uh and into the window system right now the main problems here of course are quite simple first of all uh penetration testing distributions are not designed to be run as daily drivers they can be remember that's a key point here they can be run as daily drivers but they're not designed to be run as daily drivers that's because there's something called tailor-made software all right so tailor-made software is again as the name suggests is software designed to meet specific needs and to fulfill a very specialized task or a set of tasks right in this case penetration testing right and i know many students wanting to use the operating system as the daily driver thinking it will make them better and really not understanding that right now they should be focusing on learning the fundamentals as opposed to you know installing and breaking operating systems when they don't even understand what grub is right so they go they essentially boot up the system they see the grub boot loader and they have no idea what a bootloader is yet right and then they they break the kali system somehow they they do something and of course one of the reasons that happens is because kelly doesn't create any user for you you actually just logged uh directly into the root into the root user uh by default and you know they they mock up the install and kelly stops booting right but windows still works and then they need to uninstall kali and that's where the real problems begin because it can be a very very complex process based on the distribution that you've just installed and ubuntu made it uh relatively simple but if you did anything like delete uh files from the from your your c drive i remember that also caused an issue with ubuntu ubuntu wouldn't boot and it would fundamentally break your bootloader or the grub bootloader and then you actually had to manually fix the issue so uh you know dual booting is really an archaic technique that was just more of a a way of you know for students to test out what what cali was going to be like and to use it to a certain extent but virtualization has pretty much solved that issue and as time has progressed you really will find any computer that doesn't support virtualization and the the second of course is system requirements and really honestly speaking i if you're running windows 10 um or windows 7 i that's end of life now but if you're running windows 10 you pretty much will have a base uh setup of four gigs that if you're running that's if you're running a low to medium spec build or you're running a laptop and if you have eight that's perfectly fine you know you can virtualize up to two operating systems at the same time if you give them if you share the resources modestly and you know kali typically only needs two gigs to run it's linux you can optimize it you can get rid of gnome and xfce and run something much simpler um like some of the lightweight desktop environments or you can use the tiling window manager so you can really really minimize the system resource consumption so those are the important points uh now let's talk about why uh using virtualization is much better than compared to actually physically installing something like kali or parrot os and that is of course control of the environment right so the cool thing with hypervises like virtualbox and vmware is you can control the environment from you know uh switching from a bridge connection to a nat connection you can play around with usb drives you can insert usb adapters so the the functionality works perfectly you can also control your ram your processors you can also enable nested virtualization which is pretty cool so you can also virtualize within the virtualized operating system and of course uh the thing with uh with virtual environments that's really cool is you can take snapshots right so immediately after you set up kelly you can immediately take a snapshot and if you end up breaking the operating system or you if you end up breaking kali you can immediately revert back you don't need to go through the installation process and you don't need to uninstall anything you just click delete and that virtual machine is deleted right so there isn't any uninstall process you're not dealing with bootloaders per se and that that's something that many of you will say well isn't isn't it useful for students to actually get started bootloaders yes but once they understand how linux works because the way the windows bootloader works and the way uh you know standard bootloader for linux like grub works is very different right and how linux is initialized is also very different and then they need to learn about init systems so things can get very very you know complex very quickly and especially if they've been using windows my point being vms will hardly ever give you any issues regarding your virtual machines and breaking them and then of course in terms of installing things like kali linux and parrot os they already have a pre-built virtual virtual machine images so if you go into downloads here and uh i'm on the kali page and these are the iso files these are the installer files which you can also install on a on a virtual machine or a hypervisor and then you have the vmware and virtualbox images where you don't even need to install kali linux however i do recommend you install it once or twice just to get familiar with how linux is installed as opposed to other operating systems right so that's good experience for you learn how to install linux learn how to how to compile uh your own programs with linux that's more of the important thing you need to look at first before you start taking a look at the internals you know kernel and user space and stuff like that and the same goes for parrot os i mean all of them now all have vm images so that's pretty much my take on the subject the reason i wanted to make this video is because i you know there are lots of students getting into cyber security for various reasons not primarily into penetration testing but things like reverse engineering uh cryptography uh android and ios uh hacking and reverse engineering and you know kali is pretty much the one-stop shop to to you know to all of these tools because they have a great repository of tools as well in addition to the tools that come pre-installed on the system so again i'm telling you right now don't dual boot kali linux with windows it's really not a good thing uh or a very useful thing you'll do with your time because you'll pretty much waste a lot of your time uh sorting sorting out issues regarding your bootloader and of course when it comes down to to to when you need to uninstall it things will become increasingly complex uh from there but it is possible but it's not you know the the de facto standard now the de facto standard is to virtualize um your your penetration testing distributions and then once you move on from that you can start talking about things like containerization and using cloud instances to actually host your tools and utilizing you know ssh to access your cloud instance and then performing your tests from there so we're really moving away from the physical install if you don't mind me saying uh into a very virtualized environment where you know you have much more control over the environment your your um your virtual machine environment so uh that's pretty much all i wanted to cover in this video i would love to hear what you guys think regarding this uh this topic so you you know leave your feedback in the comment section and i'm really really uh curious to see what you guys have to say so that's gonna be it for this video and i'll be seeing you in the next video peace [Music] you