Mark M Manning

A site for information involving myself and my career.

BackTrack 2: Installing to a USB drive

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Back Track Linux. If you haven't heard of it, you can call it the most talked about linux live distribution for penetration testing. It's a mixture of older distributions Whax which had a lot of penetration testing tools and auditing which was focused on forensics. Back Track just gives it all to you and more. Here's their site: http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html

This post is for first things first. How to run it from more places than just a CD. Specifically a USB pen [no pun intended, or is it?] drive.

Install to a USB pen drive

This is really easy.
  1. Download BackTrack Linux Link
  2. If you're running Windows, burn the iso to disc and boot your computer into backtrack
  3. Run this command which will mount the iso you downloaded
  4. Copy the /boot and /BT folders to your pen drive
  5. run "sync" to make sure files are where they're supposed to be
  6. then run a handy script called "bootinst.sh" from the /boot folder thats on the USB drive/span>. If you do it from anywhere else you'll be at risk of overwriting the MBR on an important device.
  7. You'll get something like this
  8. You're done!?

That's all that I needed to do on my Lenovo T43 but I know from experience this will not always work. On my system, I needed to go into the BIOS and add the USB HD as a boot option but that was it.

External Links

http://backtrack.offensive-security.com/index.php?title=Howto:USB_Stick - a web pages that goes into how to install to USB from Windows, Linux, and OSX.

http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html -BackTrack website.