A How-To ... Help - I dd'd to sda instead of sdb

[dkeg]

I'm posting to put it out there, and hopefully will maybe help someone else one day.

I did it today, it was bound to happen. After all, we do this so much. Anyway, its done and everything is gone. However, I do back up my configs and such, but did lose my wallpapers. I had a bunch of code too I lost, but I don't do that anymore, so I guess it doesn't really matter. Although I do think I have that on my external drive.

Anyway ...

I ran into other problems when attempting to resolve. I thought, easy peasy, boot fresh from an stick and start configurating. It was not that easy. It took me a few tries to finally realize that there seemed to be a sector that was not getting overwritten, even though I had completely restructured my HD. From ddg, I found

It appears that you somehow got an iso9660 filesystem header written into your hard disk's boot track. Since your first partition starts at sector 2048, and you are using the conventional msdos partition table, you can eliminate it by writing zeros to sectors 1-2047 with the following command:

And resolved with booting into a live cd and using chroot (with help of the fine work of the BBQ Cookbook

Then once I was in a root teminal on the system and before installing and updating grub

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sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 seek=1 count=2047

Then I was free to successfully install and update grub. Finished up and rebooted. Success!

I am now finally back to basically where I left off. Well, minus a collection of a few years of choice walls ....

EDIT: fixed cookbook url

[pidsley]

Ouch. But thanks for the guide.

(Moved topic to HowTo subforum)

[dkeg]

Thanks pids, yeah, i was teetering on where to post.

[pidsley]

Thanks pids, yeah, i was teetering on where to post.

I think the HowTo subforum is new -- I always used to post mine in the Support section, and bacon (I think) moved them to HowTo.

[wuxmedia]

yeah shit - thank goodness for backups.

Also this (apart from the chrooting bit) Fixes my USB flash drives after the length is 'set' by the dd'ing I then format them in windows as gparted refused to format as FAT32, although cfdisk works OK...

although the code is more

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 sudo dd bs=4M if=/dev/zero of=USBstick