Adding applications to CAINE Live USB

[finkga]

I'm new to CAINE and to Live USB Linux in general. When I made my CAINE Live USB, I enabled a persistent home space so I could collect information. But now I find I'd also like to add new tools to the USB, particularly partimage. (Yes, I realize partimage is not a forensic tool, but I need it for other reasons.) Unfortunately, I can't install it standalone in the home space because it requires libbz2 and stuff to be installed in the normal locations.

So, how can I install partimage persistently in the CAINE Live USB? Can I mount the squashfs partition rw and install there somehow?

Thanks,

Glenn

[nannib]

did you try this procedure?
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage

[finkga]

I did this, and partimage worked fine. But when I rebooted, partimage was gone. I found out that this was because CAINE uses a squashfs file system that loads the root partition as read-only. There is a complex procedure to use unionfs to add stuff into a separate file to be merged with the main partition, but I haven't managed to do this yet.

[nannib]

me too... :-)

But...why don't you use AIR or DD or DC3DD to copy the partitions?
eg.:
dc3dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/sdb1/partition_disk.dd progress=on conv=noerror,sync bs=512

or piping it with gzip if you need the compression...or using AFF or LibEWF...there are many tools to backup the partitions...
Let me know...
bye

[finkga]

AIR is great for forensic quality backups. But in this case, I needed a _quick_ backup of a 250GB partition. Tools like dd do a disk copy of all the sectors (including the unused ones) and take a _long_ time. You can save space by zeroing out all the unused sectors before you back up, but there's nothing you can do about the time. For my application, rapid backup and quick-and-dirty first-pass forensics were all that were needed. So partimage was the ticket. I just found out that there's no easy way to add packages to live USBs built on the squashfs file system. My answer may come from just replicating CAINE's tool suite on a standard Ubuntu distro instead.

Thanks anyway!

-- Glenn

[nannib]

Ok I got you :-)
you can do this:
http://www.caine-live.net/page13/page13.html

Install Caine, apply the procedure above and rebuild the usb stick, using your customized Caine distro...
that's all!
It's easier than customize a virgin Ubuntu :-)
Let me know
bye

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