Pendrivelinux RSS Feed

USB SLAX install

SLAX is a small Live Linux CD distribution created by Tomas Matejicek. SLAX is basically a stripped down version of Slackware Linux. It uses the unification file system or (unionfs) allowing a read only filesystem to behave as a writable filesystem which allows the user to save system wide changes without a secondary persistent partition. The following tutorial explains how to create a Portable SLAX. This guide will show you how to easily install SLAX to a portable USB device via Windows.

Updated 3/18/08: It appears that in newer versions of Slax (6.0.3+) includes install scripts and persistence is now automatic.

SLAX 6.0.3 Screenshot:

SLAX 6.0.3 Screenshot

USB SLAX creation Basic essentials:

  • A 256MB or larger USB flash drive (fat32 formatted)
  • SLAX-6.x.x.tar
  • 7-Zip or other archive extraction tool
  • Windows Host to perform the USB install

SLAX USB installation tutorial:

  1. Download the SLAX for USB .tar file
  2. Using 7-Zip extract the files from the slax-6.x.x.tar to the root of your USB stick
  3. Navigate to the boot folder on your "USB device" and click bootinst.bat (Click Continue if the following error appears)

    4. BackTrack Error

  4. Follow the onscreen instructions to make the device bootable
  5. Once the USB install script has finished, reboot your computer and set your BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from the USB device
  6. Save your BIOS settings. On the next reboot, you should have a successful launch of your USB SLAX Linux compilation

* If you need any additional help making your flash drive boot, check out our BIOS boot options section or Tools Section.

Posted under: Old Windows based tutorials

Related Portable Linux Posts