Linux on USB (persistent mode)
May 10th, 2009Last Thursday, i did a quite stupid mistake. I wanted to try Backtrack persistent mode in my usb drive, but accidentally i activate the Lilo in backtrack. The bad thing is, once lilo is executed, it is installed in both my flash disk master boot record and my primary hard disk boot record (even i didn’t mount the primary hard disk). 
Now, my laptop is still being handled by my company IT, because even i did the recovery using Vista recovery CD, i can not make the pointsec (encryption software for my laptop) boot loader appears again.
Ok, back to the main story,
Backtrack 3 is good, it is based on Slax, but it’s quite difficult to install new package. So, i am using Backtrack 4 beta now, which is based on Ubuntu and is completed with standard Ubuntu apt-get utility, so you can easily add anything you want. I found it is quite interesting to have one Backtrack 4 usb drive with persistent mode, you can just easily bring one flash disk, find an available pc/laptop, boot your usb, and you get you complete linux tools. Persistent mode means it will keep your changes during reboot.
Why I choose backtrack? two reason, first, backtrack gives you almost all standard networking tools, including wireshark, and any sniffing or tunneling tools, so if you are network engineer, you should like this one. Second, even linux is not my favorite, at this moment, creating live usb with persistent mode in FreeBSD is still not easy and after you create the live usb, you still need to populate your usb with all the required tools.
You can find all the necessary step to create backtrack 4 live usb persisten mode in http://www.infosecramblings.com/backtrack/backtrack-4-usbpersistent-changesnessus/
The story is not stop here. Sometimes, I want to use some tools from my backtrack live USB but i don’t want to reboot my laptop and leave my windows because all my documents and my corporate tools and email are inside my windows.
Asking for answer from Google gives me some conclusions:
- VMware can’t boot from USB
- vxmVirtualBox is not clear, document said that usb booting is not implemented in VirtualBox bios. Some people reported that they can boot from USB but some people can’t.
- Qemu is definitely supports usb booting.
So, since i have been using qemu for sometimes to simulate my Juniper Olive, qemu is familiar for me.I just boot my USB inside the qemu (detailed procedure can be found here, and configure my internet connection sharing from my real ethernet interface to the TAP interface that connect my qemu to the the host PC.
This is my qemu command line to boot my backtrack USB:
E:\qemu>qemu -L . -m 256 -hda //./PhysicalDrive3 -net nic,vlan=0,macaddr=00:aa:00:00:01:00 -net tap,vlan=0,ifname=tap3
./rendo
