A couple of questions on Backtrack:

[Rick_Percy87]

Hey im new to all this.
Just wondering whether installing backtrack on a 1gb USB drive would leave adequate space to further install John the Ripper and a dictionary? Also would cracking my password via a dictionary attack would process as quickly as if i was running it off my hard disk?

Thanks for reading

Richard

[nka389]

I'm new to BackTrack as well, so forgive me if this turns out to be incorrect, but as far as I know if you are going to install BackTrack on a USB you will need at least 2.7Gb of free space, which 1Gb USB obviously does not provide.

With regards to the speed, I'm pretty sure BackTrack will always run faster from HDD than a USB. LiveCD is the worst, USB being faster and HDD being the fastest.

Hope this helps.

[drakoth777]

If speed is what you seek, then install backtrack into RAM, it's one of the options on the boot menu of the backtrack livecd

[Barry]

If speed is what you seek, then install backtrack into RAM, it's one of the options on the boot menu of the backtrack livecd

Only if you have a lot of ram.

[imported_blackfoot]

Directly copy the directories you need to the usb and chroot to update lilo.conf and run lilo to assign details to the mbr.

The basics will easily fit on to a 1 G usb stick with room to spare for data.

I am afraid the obvious answer to your question about the dictionary depends on the size of the file. You might consider placing a 'huge' dictionary on to a second 'data usb stick'.

I do not know that a spare 2.7GB is required to complete the installation as stated elsewhere.

Speed of access might not be a problem in use because many programs call data (such as wordlists) into memory and operate there. Certainly routine access to a usb stick can be slower than fixed disks.

In such a case dependent on memory one might create a loopback stage in memory and mount it as a drive after depositing your data there. There is little point in installing the whole OS and all the programs into ram if you only need access to a couple of programs. Once running most of the OS is in ram anyway.

atb