usbdrive

A quick How-To for creating a bootable USB drive to load Backtrack 2.

This is very easy in windows. I just wanted to note it so I could remember it in the future and so others might not have to dig through the loads of badly organized information on the BackTrack2 forums and wiki. As noted before, this is for windows XP, and I will go ahead and do it step by step.

1. Download the Backtrack2 ISO

2. Insert your USB drive, and note what drive label it is given (ex: “M:”)

3. Use THIS utility (not sure who made it) to format your USB drive.

4. Format a FAT partition and do not do a quick format.

5. Open ISO that you downloaded in WINRAR.

6. Copy the files from that ISO to the USB drive. Once that transfer is complete, open your flash drive in windows. There should be two folders “boot” and “BT”.

7. Go to Start > Run and type “cmd” without the “” and press enter.

8. In this first line, type in the drive letter of your USB drive. (ex: “M:” without “”) and press enter.

9. type in “cd boot” and press enter

10. type in “bootinst.bat” and press enter.

11. This will bring up a batch file that will format the drive to boot the distro. Press any key to continue (WARNING: make sure you are doing this on your flash drive. If you do on the same drive as your windows partition you will screw up your MBR, which makes XP unable to boot without being repaired.)

12. If there are no errors, and it says it is ready to boot, then simply press any key to exit the window. Also close your cmd window.

13. Now you are ready! Just reboot, and make sure you boot from USB instead of the hard drive your windows installation is on. You should be able to boot up Backtrack2 just fine now.

If there are any corrections with my method please send me an email and I will correct it. This is pretty simple stuff, and should take about 3 minutes (minus the download time for the ISO). Have fun!