custom 'casper' directory location for BackTrack
This turned out to be more complicated than I thought.
At first, I thought that it's just a matter of changing the boot parameter - both the lowercase and uppercase ones (I didn't know which was right); after all, they contain the word "casper".
/boot/vmlinuz BOOT=/path/to/casper boot=/path/to/casper
(On hindsight, it seems that BOOT is an artifact - only boot gets picked up.)
That failed miserably.
Loading, please wait...
/init: line 189: can't open /scripts/path/to/casper
kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!
After some googling, I stumbled on this forum post. Even though, it was in Russian, it was very helpful in providing instructions on "reverse-engineering" - and putting back together - initrd.gz.
With this new lead, I could start hacking, and came up with the patch below. The scripts were pretty well-written with lots of encapsulation, so there weren't a lot of changes required to get the desired functionality.
Patch and instructions are provided below:
