Is there a disadvantage to dual booting backtrack? Less safe than live cd?

[Cannon00]

Hi everyone, I'm new here. I'm a cs student and I'm trying to get a much better understanding of networks, tcp ip etc. I've decided to try backtrack out, and spend most of my free time trying to learn as much as I can about vulnerabilities and how the tools work since it's a much more interesting and applicable area of computer knowledge than the things I usually get to study in school.

I've been reading posts on here about why it's not a great idea to run backtrack as a primary O/S(partly because you'll always be running as root) unless you really know you're way around linux and are more than a novice with security issues. Is there any reason however not to dual boot it on a partitioned hard drive? Would there be any security issues to deal with that wouldn't be present when running it from a flash drive?

I'm very new to this stuff, but I'd like to learn. I'm at the end of the second year of my cs degree but I don't have much practical knowledge from it so far. The little amount of useful knowledge I have, has mostly been accumulated from trying things on my own. I'm pretty new to linux also. Though not completely new. Ubuntu has been my primary os for about a year or two now, and I've dabbled in a couple other distributions.

Should I dual boot BackTrack or run it from a flash drive? I'd prefer dual boot unless you guys can enlighten me as to a reason not to.

Thanks for any answers

Jeff

[sickness]

Well this really is your choice.

[spiky001]

I created a user account on my BT4 Maybe this will help dont know how other ppl feel about this?

[skor78]

If you're willing to learn and prefer dual-boot to flash drive boot, my advice is go for it! It runs faster, and you'll have less issues to consider (like free space, etc..).
The issues you present could easily be surpassed with some research reading.

Unless you're only using the default drivers and tools on BT4, i wouldn't recommend you'd use live cd, cuz all changes you made will be lost at reboot/shutdown.

Happy Learning!

[Ventrik]

The only real reason you'd run LiveCD over a dual boot is if you can't afford to partition or you are not always on the same machine at any given time, or even your own rig to start with. Installing it gives you dedicated hard drive space and more speed as you're not running off your read speed from a CD/DVD tray versus from your HDD which depending on hardware can be a lot faster. Not to mention frees up the tray itself. I'm pretty sure it boots faster since you aren't going through the "first time boot" sequence every time you boot.

But I could also be entirely wrong I'm just taking a guess, I don't even have bt4 downloaded yet and the only Linux based system I've used was Free-BSD six years ago?

[BudEWiser]

I have mine set up on a 100GB USB hard drive with "full disk encryption" by following the tutorial found on the tutorials page (not in the forum). They can easily be found on clearance for $40-50 US.
This allows me to not have Backtrack on any of my regular hard drives, but I can easily boot to it whenever I want. The only thing that seems a bit slow is booting, other than that it's quite fast.
In my opinion Backtrack probably shouldn't be used as your "every day" operating system for regular browsing, banking, and such. Much like the old Knoppix STD, it's built for security testing and it's focus really isn't on user security. It would probably be best to dual boot with another linux distro like Ubuntu or Kubuntu since Backtrack is built on that foundation.