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, we can create a bootable Live USB drive of a vast majority of Linux distributions, including BackTrack with persistent storage.
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
· UNetbootin (unetbootin.sourceforge.net/unetbootin-windows-latest. exe)
· You can download BackTrack 5 from http://www.backtrack-linux.org/ downloads/
Let's begin the process of installing BackTrack 5 to a USB drive:
1. Insert our previously formatted USB drive:
2. Start UNetbootin as administrator.
3. Choose the Diskimage option and select the location of the BackTrack DVD ISO image:
4. Set the amount of space to be used for persistence. We're going to use 4096 MB for our 8 GB USB thumb drive:
5. Select our USB drive and click on the OK button to start creating the bootable USB drive.
6. The process will take some time to complete while it extracts and copies the DVD files to the USB and installs the Bootloader:
7. The installation is complete and we're ready to reboot the computer and boot from the newly created BackTrack USB drive with persistent memory: