I followed the article precisely and have no problems other than the fact that nessusd takes forever to start - it pegs the CPU for quite some time, but doesn't seem to utilize much RAM.

Thanks again.

I'm not sure what is going on here. I have always used the BT3 USB version for my persistent installs. One option you might try is to remove sdb2 and sdb5 and just create on second partition. I'm not positive, but I don't think the extended partition is necessary unless you want to add more that 4 partitions to a drive. This would get rid of any confusion the OS is experiencing re sdb2 vs. sdb5.

Kevin

I used the older BackTrack 3 Final USB on a 8 gb sandisk flash drive. I partitioned and formatted the flash drive and the Back Track 3 boots from the flash drive. The KDE System Partition information shows /dev/sdb1 with 2,043 mb as vfat, and dev/sdb5 as ext2 with 5,528 mb. This matches what I see when I look at /mnt and see BT3 and boot on /dev/sdb1 and the changes directory on sdb5.

The fdisk -l output shows the same display the previous poster showed. The dev/sdb2 doesn't show up under the /mnt or KDE partitions tho. It is as if /dev/sdb2 was the extended unallocated space before I did the format, and after the format it became /dev/sdb5.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 261 2096451 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2 262 977 5751270 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 262 977 5751238+ 83 Linux

But, it never writes any files on the changes directory so I don't get persistence. I notice there is also a changes directory under root /changes and one menu option was for putting a slax.dat file under the /changes directory. This doesn't work either.

I edited vesamenu to only one option:

PROMPT 0
TIMEOUT 120
DEFAULT /boot/vesamenu.c32

LABEL xconf1
MENU LABEL BT3 Persistent ***my changes***
KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz
APPEND vga=0x317 initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw changes=/dev/sdb5

Now here is an interesting point. I did the same thing for BackTrack 4 Beta on another 8 gb flash drive using the DVD ISO, and got the same /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb5 partitions. It is a different brand flash drive so that is a diffence.

The BackTrack 4 Beta boots from the USB and creates files under changes on /dev/sdb5...lots of them so persistence does work.

Any ideas? Does it relate to my using the BT3 USB instead of the CD ISO?

It looks like you have already partitioned the disk correctly and the second partition is configured for linux. All you need to do now is format the second partition which, according the above output of the fdisk commnd, should be /dev/sdb2. Use the following command to format the second partition.

mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb2 *make sure /dev/sdb2 is not your system drive *

Once that is done, you can continue with the tutorial and everything should work well.

-Kevin

Thanks for making this tutorial!

I’m stuck on one part though. I have managed to install BT onto my USB drive and it is now bootable and working great.

My problem is making it persistent.

You say you “used fdisk to create a second partition from the remainder of the drive and formatted it with mkfs.ext2. In my case my usb drive was /dev/sda”

But I’m lost as to the command to use and the fdisk man pages are a little scary.

Could you tell me what to enter?

I have a 4gb flash drive, this is the fdisk -l output:

Disk /dev/sdb: 4022 MB, 4022337536 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 489 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0×000d5956

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 141 1132551 b W95 FAT32
/dev/sdb2 142 489 2795310 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 142 489 2795278+ 83 Linux

What is the fdisk command should I enter?

If you could tell me that would be really appreciated!

Many thanks!

Steve