HOWTO: Create 12.04 Persistent & Backtrack 5 USB

**appsman** · July 1st, 2012

Yeah, FlyingSilverFin that was some good sleuthing, and this USB boot drive rocks! Thanks for the handy guide.

To wrap this up in case anyone is reading this thread, I would say nothing to worry about here, just stick with the original post #1 - *except* the following:
I recommend putting a note about setting the boot flag in the original post.

---
And here are a few side notes.

For the record a "read-only" error appears when copying an iso (Backtrack iso in the code below). This error can be ignored.
Code:
```
$ sudo mount -o loop /path/to/Backtrack/image.iso /media/iso
mount: warning: /media/iso seems to be mounted read-only.
```
I could not do this

create a file /media/USBDRIVE/boot/grub/grub.cfg

because the partition was full. Root cause is that when I specified "4GB" gparted took it as 4GB maximum, which ended up being about 3.75GB. You reported 4.25GB. I contemplated making the swap file 1300MB instead of this
Code:
```
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/USBDRIVE/casper-rw bs=1M count=1500
```
but decided to start all over again because I want the extra swap space, and the ~10GB partition is plenty big anyway.
Finally, there is a "grain of truth" to the .lz versus .gz typo: this file does exist for Backtrack.
Code:
```
/media/USBDRIVE/boot/BT5/casper/initrd.gz
```

**sbrown995** · August 4th, 2012

Hey flyingsliverfin, This is a great tutorial. I was wondering if there is a way to make backtrack 5 persistent as well. Or does this already do that as well as make ubuntu persistent?

**arashiredsun** · January 25th, 2013

I recommend you watch this video easy and fast ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtPAybac_rY

**arashiredsun** · January 25th, 2013

Originally Posted by appsman

It skips USB and boots normal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtPAybac_rY

**complience** · March 5th, 2013

Can you add these developments to your original post?
I'm not sure on what order all the steps need to be applied now

**tom-visser-1985** · December 24th, 2013

Originally Posted by flyingsliverfin

Then make it the right type of file. I'm not really sure what this step does, but it seems to me like it turns the file into a sort of ext4 filesystem that is theoretically mountable (?). Just guessing.

Code:

mkfs.ext4 -F /media/USBDRIVE/casper-rw

Didn't really read through comments/ replies yet, so i might be restating someone else, but you are indeed correct

ty for the guide, I actually have a script that is very similar that is on another system, and you saved me a lot of work trying to track down what i needed to rewrite it.