Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Guide

Installing BackTrack on a Portable USB
BackTrack can also be made portable by installing it on to a USB flash drive. This way you can 
carry BackTrack Live anywhere. This practice is useful for outsource penetration tests and, more-
over, it is very easy to make BackTrack USB.
For this you need the following:
◾
USB flash drive (minimum 8 GB)
◾
A disk burning software
For this purpose, we are going to use PowerISO, which is freely available online at http://www.
poweriso.com
Step 1
—Format your flash drive and 
ensure
that it has at least 7 GB of free space.

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Step 2
—Open PowerISO from the “Start” menu.
Step 3
—Click on “Tools” and from 
the
dropdown list select “Make a bootable USB.”

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Step 4
—The following dialogue box will appear.
Step 5
—Locate your BackTrack 
ISO
disk image.

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Step 6
—Now it will start burning the image on to your USB drive.
Step 7
—When the process is complete, the following message appears.

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Installing BackTrack on Your Hard Drive
If you run BackTrack from VMware or virtual box, any changes you made would be removed after 
rebooting; to solve this issue, we need to install BackTrack on the hard drive.
For this, we need two things:
1. BackTrack Live CD or BackTrack installed on VMware or virtual box.
2. A hard drive with minimum 20 GB free space.
Step 1
—Insert the disk into the drive and boot from it. This is what you will see in the beginning:
Step 2
—Then you will see the screen root@bt:, where you will have to type the command 
“startx”.
Step 3
—Now that we have booted into BackTrack, we will install it on our hard drive. Click 
on the icon “Install BackTrack” and your installation should start.

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Step 4
—On the Welcome screen, you will have to select the appropriate language and click 
“Forward”.
Step 5
—Now select your time zone. Or, if you are already connected to the network, your time 
zone will automatically be detected.

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Step 6
—Now a window to select the desired keyboard layout appears.
Step 7
—Next we will have to set the partition size. In most cases we leave it to default and the 
entire partition is erased.

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Step 8
—Now the install summary appears and you just have to click on “Install” and your 
work is done.
The installer will take some time to complete, which may be several minutes.
After the installation is complete, you will be prompted to restart your PC and as you reset 
your BackTrack, it will be installed to your hard drive.

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