Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

As recommended, I am using BL2 floppy version with no hds mounted to wipe 
clean the partition table on /hda (which somehow got messed up so that 
fdisk and other programs see a 3GB hard drive where there is a 1.2GB) 
using dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda

It clicked away, probably overwriting everything on the drive, and 
finished in 40 min, having used up to 95.4% cpu and 254 of 256MB RAM.

Now fdisk tells me
"FATAL ERROR:  Bad signature on partition table.  Press any key to exit 
cfdisk."

Do I recycle this drive now?  Or try a low-level format?


Theoretical question:

Is there a way to just overwrite the partition table, which Running Linux 
says is in the first 1024 bytes?  They explain that
dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/stuff bs=1k count=1
saves the first 1024 bytes of data to a file.

I need to get this ASUS computer working again soon because when I tried 
my shiny new scsi kernel (as well as a SW71 aic7xxx.s and SW81 adaptec.s) 
with my newly compiled SANE 0.67 package (which includes my old UMAX 
scanner) and even with the SW81 SANE package, it told me no scanners were 
found.  (And when using the SW81 kernel I got lots of messages about 
modprobe which were not fixed by ln -s lsmod modprobe).

The scanner works on my other ASUS with a different card and cable but 
same scsi module for the card.  The cable and card work in this computer 
with a zip drive (sd_mod.o instead of sg.o).  But according to 
ex-list-member Hal, sometimes a scanner that works with SANE in one 
computer won't be recognized in another.  I seem to have two such 
computers already.  One works with Win31 scanner software but not with 
SANE.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org