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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] hd problem
  • Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 20:08:11 +0000 (UTC)

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

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?


David sent me a little DOS low level formatting utility (1987) which chose interleaf 7 and then told me 'Cannot format drive'. But maybe a 1987 program cannot format a 1.2GB drive so I may stick it in the computer with low-level capability in the BIOS.

SOme web research revealed that the partition table is in the first 512K and to overwrite that count=1 bs=512 (but they said dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/zero - is this right?). Another site suggested that someone had accidentally formatted the whole drive with a file system instead of a partition" but they had different symptoms tho the same FATAL ERROR in cfdisk.

Might the first 512 bytes of my hard drive have gone bad? If so it will be only the second hard drive we have lost in 20 years. 1.44M floppy disks seem to lose more sectors every time you look at them (scandisk three times in a row kept finding more bad sectors when I tried to find something to make into a boot disk).




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