Feb 21, 2012
Recently I wanted to make use of my 16GB usb drive in a sensible way, and I didn't really need another classic pendrive for moving data. In the end I decided to install BackTrack on it. BackTrack is a general forensic analysis/penetration testing distribution based on Debian. And it's fairly nice as far as a rescue distribution too.
I could have installed with with UNetbootin, which has direct support for BackTrack, but I wanted something a little more fancy: full disc encryption and persistence of data.
There is a very nice how-to linked from main BackTrack website for doing exactly this sort of thing. But I didn't want to burn the image first or even reboot. We have virtualization for that today! Right? Right! Or not...
So I downloaded BackTrack KDE/64bit variant iso, checked the md5sum to be correct, and started installation. Silly me thoght that running a KVM VM like this would make it possible to install BackTrack on the usb drive:
$ virt-install -n test -r 1024 --cdrom BT5R1-KDE-64.iso \
             --boot cdrom --nonetworks --graphics spice \
             --disk path=/dev/sdg
    
Where BT5R1-KDE-64.iso would be my BackTrack iso image and /dev/sdg would be my USB drive. Sadly this failed with ugly error message after BackTrack started booting:
# (initramfs) mount: mounting dev/loop0 on //filesystem.squashfs failed
    
After some investigation I found out that BackTrack booted fine if it was the only drive in the system, but failed with the above messages when I tried to attach my USB drive. Never found the reson, but the solution was to make the USB drive use virtio bus like this:
$ virt-install -n test -r 1024 --cdrom BT5R1-KDE-64.iso \
             --boot cdrom --nonetworks --graphics spice \
             --disk path=/dev/sdg,bus=virtio
    
After that I just continued according to the how-to with a few differences (such as USB key being seen as /dev/vda). Welcome our encypted overlords.

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