Backtrack 4 Final persistent storage without repartitioning

[Xhr0no]

Since all the guides around would only tell how to make a portable persistent Backtrack live usb by repartitioning your drive to make a persistent partition, I decided it would be easier to make one without the need of a separate partition

Things required:
A usb thumbdrive (At least 2GB) or a usb harddisk
Backtrack 4 Final ISO
7-zip (or any other compression software you prefer)
Grub4dos (Grub or grub2 will work but in this guide i'll focus on grub4dos)
Casper-RW Creator v0.2

Lets assume everything is present and the usb drive is empty and we'll begin

Installing Grub4dos
1. First we need to make the usb bootable, so we run grubinst_gui.exe (apparently it isnt inside the file linked above so download it here

2. Under device name select the drive of your usb disk, You can find out the disk number by going to the DiskManagement Console in control panel.
After selecting the correct disk. Please make sure it is the correct one, if it isn't it might result in you not being able to even boot your computer anymore (technically speaking it will boot, but it won't boot any Operating Systems). And last but not least click on 'install'.

3. After completing the install copy everything inside the grub4dos zip into the usb drive.

Putting Backtrack into USB
1. Open the ISO you have downloaded earlier using 7-zip

2. Extract everything into the root directory of the usb drive

Making the loopback persistent file for Windows
1. Run Casper-RW Creator, accept the license agreement, then select the drive grub4dos been installed to.

2. Click next and select the size of the loopback file you need. (Note: The maximum file size on a FAT32 is 4GB, The loopback file can be resized i linux)

3. Now wait while the loopback file is created.

Making the loopback persistent file for Linux
1. Open up a terminal in the directory you want the loopback file to be located (make sure it is on the root of the drive)

2. Run

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=casper-rw bs=1M count=1024

replacing 1024 with the size of the loopback file you want.

3. Then format the loopback file using

Code:

mkfs.ext3 -F casper-rw

Configuring Grub
Open up the menu.1st with your favorite text editor and add the following entry into it

Code:

title BT4 Beta - Console - Persistent
find --set-root /boot/initrd800.gz
kernel /boot/vmlinuz boot=casper persistent rw splash
initrd /boot/initrd.gz

Save it and test backtrack with persistent storage