Create a Live CD on a Bootable USB Flash Drive

For convenience and portability, you can’t beat creating your own bootable CD-ROM (aka a Live CD) on a USB flash drive. Previously, I showed you how to create a Linux security-oriented distribution on a Live CD that lets you take your security tools with you to boot a failed or suspect computer without affecting the host OS. (See “Virtual Machines and Backtrack” at http://www.securityprovip.com/Articles/ArticleID/95921/95921.html). However, CD-ROM-based Live CDs can be a bit bulky, and once created, you can’t do anything else with them. For computers that support booting from a USB port—and most newer computers do—a USB 2.0 flash drive boots a Live CD distro faster than a CD-ROM, and you can use the remaining space on the flash drive as storage. For example, you could copy the 689MB Live CD version of BackTrack on a FAT32-formatted 2GB flash drive and still have more than a gigabyte of storage available. If you’re working on a Windows computer, you can insert the flash drive and access your Windows tools, reference docs, or other data, or reboot the host and boot to the Linux-based BackTrack Live CD. Sound good? Let’s create one for you. . . .