Baslinux mailing list

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

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).