Running Backtrack from a USB thumb drive on a MacBook Air
-
Download Backtrack Linux. I used
BT5R3-GNOME-64.iso
. -
Format the thumb drive with Disk Utility (FAT, MBR).
-
Use UNetbootin to copy the image to the thumb drive.
-
Use
fdisk
to mark the partition as active:- Run
diskutil list
to check the device path for the thumb drive. On my system, it was/dev/disk2
. - Unmount the disk with
diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
. - Run
fdisk -e /dev/rdisk2
to edit the MBR. (Note the r, though I doubt it's actually necessary.) - Useful commands in fdisk:
print
to print the current MBR content,f 1
to mark the first partition as "active",write
to write the changes to the MBR.
- Run
-
Reboot, hold the Option key, and choose the drive labeled "Windows".
- I tried making two partitions on the thumb drive, and installing Backtrack on the first one. It did not show up in the boot loader.