Installing BackTrack to a USB drive with persistent memory

Having a BackTrack USB drive provides us with the ability to persistently save system settings and permanently update and install new software packages onto the USB device, allowing us to carry our own personalized BackTrack with us at all times. Thanks to open source tools such as UNetbootin, Universal usb installer, we can create a bootable Live USB drive of a vast majority of Linux distributions, including BackTrack with persistent storage.

Getting ready

The following tools and preparation are needed in order to continue:

·        A FAT32 formatted USB drive with a minimum capacity of 8 GB

·        A BackTrack ISO image

·        You can download BackTrack 5 from http://www.backtrack-linux.org/downloads/

·        UNetbootin (unetbootin.sourceforge.net/unetbootin-windows-latest.

exe)

How to do it...

Let's begin the process of installing BackTrack 5 to a USB drive

•   Insert our previously formatted USB drive:

•              Start UNetbootinas administrator.
•              Choose the Diskimageoptionand select the location of the BackTrack DVD ISO   image:

 

•        Set the amount of space to be used for persistence. We're going to use 4096 M  for our 8 GB USB thumb drive:
• 
  

•  Select our USB drive and click on the OKbutton to start creating the bootable USB drive.
•    The process will take some time to complete while it extracts and copies the DVD files to the USB and installs the Bootloader :

•      The installation is complete and we're ready to reboot the computer and boot from the newly created BackTrack USB drive with persistent memory: