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the changes i make in bt4 persistent on a usb are not kept after rebooting. everything else seems to be working properly including internet because i am writing this post from bt4. are there any other settings that need to be selected other than choosing BT4 Persistent from the boot menu?
i followed those instructions except i used unetbootin to create the bootable usb
Then you didn't follow those instructions.Quote:
Originally Posted by ample
How many partitions do you have on the stick ?
How are they formatted (fat32,ext2,ext3,ntfs) ?
What are the partition labels ?
What menu entry are you selecting when you boot ?
fair enough. i followed the steps in the video. everything ran smoothly until i rebooted to the usb and it dropped me into a grub command line. ive found 1 or 2 other people mention the same problem on the forums but no one has responded to them. the only difference is i performed the steps in ubuntu instead of backtrack. im not sure if this could cause the problem unless there is a difference between the grub-install commands in ubuntu and backtrack.
edit: out of curiousity, i wrote down the kernel and initrd lines listed under the persistent entry in menu.lst, and manually typed them into the grub command line. unsurprisingly, it booted up into the persistent version of bt4, which does keep changes after reboot. the only problem is that on every startup i have to manually type the kernel and initrd lines into the grub command line. has anyone experienced this problem before? is grub not loading menu.lst for some reason?
Ok, first thing's first. You went through with ubuntu, are you sure that it's the same version of grub in ubuntu? There could've been a keyword in the menu.lst that an older version doesn't recegonize, and it's in turn panicing. Having said so, with the use of unetbootin the damage is done, and your jump drive will only want to boot with syslinux, unless you do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx , or at least in my experences syslinux doesn't want to come off. If you have ever used unetbootin with that jump drive in the past, and not zeroed it out it would try to boot with syslinux, and with no config give you a boot: prompt, so are you sure it was a grub boot prompt. And, just to wrap things up, as long as you have an ext3 partition named casper-rw with a block size of 4096 (yeah... block size has messed me up in the past... *painful flash back* I don't want to think about it) and the arguments getting appended to the kernel include persistent, as opposed to nopersistent, even syslinux will boot with a persistent load.
I hope this helped some, and good luck, man.
Yeah, l had same problem when l partitioned the USB into FAT and EXT3 using Gparted.
lt only worked when l followed the advice in the HOW-TO section called:
Backtrack 4 – USB/Persistent Changes/Nessus
First l had to use the format method they suggest:
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdb2
because Gparted doesn't do the same thing it seems!!!
Then l just edited the menu.lst file in grub:
cd /mnt/sda1/boot/grub
vi menu.lst
like so:
# change the default line below to ‘default 4′ and append ‘vga=0×317′ (that’s a zero) to the kernel line to set the resolution to 1024×768
Voila lol.