Backtrack 2 is maybe my favorite livecd, largely due to being security/pen-testing oriented. I have an older laptop which doesn’t do so well with 128MB RAM when running a livecd. So, I’ve permanently installed BackTrack on this laptop (which I’m using for this update right now). Here’s my steps (very abbreviated) on doing this. I largely followed this tutorial with minor adjustments.

I had to transplant the HD into another laptop that had enough RAM to properly load the livecd. After that, I booted up into BackTrack and logged in as root. Then:

fdisk /dev/hda1
d (since this is an existing drive, have to delete the first partition first)
1
n (now I want to make new partitions)
p (partition)
1
[enter]
+100M (100M boot partition)
n
p
2
[enter]
+512M (512MB swap)
n
p
3
[enter]
[enter] (will use the rest of the disk for this partition)
a
1
t
2
82 (the code for a Linux Swap)
p (one last print to make sure it all looks good, we can still back out to this point)
w (write!)

Then I went graphical with startx and followed the rest of the steps in the doc. After transplanting the drive back into my older laptop here, I was able to boot into BackTrack quite nicely (and fast compared to cd, even on this old hardware!). From here, I needed to get my wireless going. I started up K->Internet->KWifiManager which then got my Orinoco card going. I then opened a terminalL

iwconfig eth0 essid home key 7027…F9F5 (my wireless network and WEP key)
dhcpcd eth0
ifconfig (to verify I have a proper IP)
ping www.google.com