How-to: Backtrack 4 USB Persistent Changes

Here is my dirty way to make BT4 running on USB disk instead of run from DVD.

  1. Boot Live DVD Backtrack 4
  2. Split your pendrive into 2 partitions, the 1st is for your BT4 files, and the 2nd is for your changes. I have 4 GB pendrive, so i made 2 partitions with 1500MB for BT4 files (with FAT32 FS) and the rest of disk space went to another partition with Ext3 FS. You can use fdisk of cfdisk to make those things.
  3. Format it using mkfs:
    • mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n BT4 /dev/sdb1
    • mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdb2
  4. Mount them:
    • mkdir /mnt/BT4
    • mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/BT4
  5. Copy all BT4 files from mounted DVD to our new mounted partition (/mnt/BT4)
    • rsync -avh /media/cdrom/ /mnt/BT4/
  6. Instal GRUB boot loader
    • grub-install –no-floppy –root-directory=/mnt/BT4 /dev/sdb
  7. Edit the menu.lst file
    • nano /mnt/BT4/boot/grub/menu.lst
  8. Start Persistent Live CD <———- find this line
    bla bla bla quiet vga=0x317 <———- add vga=0x317 like this

  9. umount /mnt/BT4
  10. reboot

That’s it. Can’t wait for the official release ^^

reference: Offensive-Security