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
And resolved with booting into a live cd and using chroot (with help of the fine work of the BBQ CookbookIt 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:
Then once I was in a root teminal on the system and before installing and updating grub
Code: Select all
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 seek=1 count=2047
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