Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

> I am having problems even trying to boot linux, without cfdisk.
> 
> At first I got various error messages during boot about hda not 
> having an IRQ and hdb being non-IDE, kept rebooting, sometimes with 
> ignore=hda (which would not let me boot past the messages: hda:  
> status error
> hda:  drive not ready for command).  One time I was able to type 
> cfdisk -z /dev/hda and was told the above again.   Sometimes I also 
> got DriveReady DeviceFault SeekCOmplete DataRequest CorrectedError 
> Index, and somethinga about reset.

I didn't know that. This definitely looks like dying hardware. How well
does DOS (any version) handle the drive? Does the DOS fdisk even detect
the drive?

> Perhaps the controller has gone bad?  I could try a 40MB drive in 
> here as a test, or put these drives in another computer.

At that disk capacity I doubt a controller replacement is much better
than a whole HDD replacement.

> >> Do I recycle this drive now?  Or try a low-level format?
> >
> > It's already low-level formatted, if dd didn't produce any error
> > messages. No need to recycle it just yet.

I take that back. :S

> >> 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.
> >
> > Yeah, if=/dev/zero and of=/dev/hda should overwrite it if that is true.
> 
> This appears to have overwritten 1.2G, not just the 512bytes 
> containing MBR and partition table.

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

erases the whole drive.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1k count=1

erases just the first 1k. bs=blocksize, count=number of blocks. Modify
to suit your needs.

David
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