• Copy of BackTrack3 Beta – 14-12-2007 USB version (bt3b141207.rar), get it here: www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack_download.html
• SD card or USB flash drive with at least 2GB capacity

1. Using a partition editor of your choice, create 2 partitions on the SD card/USB flash drive. The first partition should be FAT 16 and at least 1GB (larger is recommended if you plan to add any additional modules, 1.5GB is a good size). The second partition should be Ext2. It MUST be Ext2, or this setup will not work. For the purposes of this how-to, the first partition will be referred to as sda1, the second as sda2.
2. Extract the files from bt3b141207.rar and copy the boot and BT3 directories and their contents to the first partition (FAT 16) of the SD card/USB flash drive.
3. Create an empty directory called changes on the second partition (Ext2) of the SD card/USB flash drive.
4. Run the bootinst.sh script contained in the boot directory on the first partition (/mnt/sda1/boot/bootinst.sh). This will make the SD card/USB flash drive bootable.
5. Edit the syslinux.cfg file found in /mnt/sda1/boot/syslinux. Specifically, find the entry for the persistent changes option, and amend the changes=/slax/slaxsave.dat boot parameter to changes=/dev/sda2 and save the amended syslinux.cfg file. The persistent changes entry should now look like:
   
   LABEL pchanges
   MENU LABEL BT3 Graphics mode with Persistent Changes
   KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz
   APPEND vga=0x317 initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw changes=/dev/sda2 autoexec=xconf;kdm
   
   Note: The /dev/sda2 path assumes that when booting from the SD card/USB flash drive your machine is identifying the FAT 16 partition as sda1 and the Ext2 partition as sda2. If the partitions are being identified as something else (sdb1 and sdb2, for example), the changes= path will need to reflect that. In other words, if the Ext2 partition is identified as sdb2, the path should be changes=/dev/sdb2.
6. Boot from the SD card/USB flash drive, select the persistent changes option from the BT3 boot menu, and you should be on your way. Before shutting down BackTrack3 for the first time, it is advisable to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.0 by adding the line rmmod snd-hda-intel just above the #Set the path. comment. This will prevent the problem of the power not completely turning off at shutdown.

This setup seems to disable the Hal daemon. Drives can still be mounted and unmounted from the command line using mount and umount.