I was being stupid by trying to help a friend with a computer problem, he wanted to get his windows xp back up and etc.

anyways, i got this dd line which i told him to do to erase his MBR.

dd if=/dev/zero of =/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1

anyways, i thought it was suppose to ONLY erase my MBR, which hopefully, i was hoping it'd do.

so I reran Lilo but i get this weird problem with my /dev/hdc1 partition, which is my Windows98 partition, I take it out and I wind up with only my Slackware partition on /dev/hdc5 still active.

so I thought, well that's not too bad, I'll just fix windows98 sometimes later and I loaded up Slackware after a reboot.

However, it didn't detect my /dev/hdc5 root partition either, so I was going CRAZY here.

I tried popping in the Slackware 10.0 CD 2 Rescue Disc. I add in the "root=/dev/hdc5" and it DOES THE SAME THING THAT HAPPENS ON SLACKWARE!!!

So now I'm panicking, I loaded up SimplyMEPIS cause I know it has qtparted. With qtparted, it doesn't show anything about my hard drive and reiserfsck doesn't seem to be helping my poor reiserfs on /dev/hdc5.

PLEASE HELP

You *REALLY* don't want to be screwing with the first block of a disk.
I mean
You *REALLY* don't want to be screwing with the first block of a disk.

As you probably already suspect, you zero'd the MBR and the partition table. Whilst you had the system active that issued the dd you had an in-storage copy.
After boot, you are history.

How good are your backups ???.

NOT TOO GOOD

well, good job me

i guess i'll get the back up cds ready

Sounds to me like you need to run gpart.

Here's a link to help you get started fixing things...
http://linux-universe.com/HOWTO/LILO...on_rescue.html

and perhaps back up your partition table after everything's fixed, with fdisk -l

gpart helps you guess the partition table. it's usually pretty good at it, but if you want to be 100% certain, you want to keep an exact copy (fdisk -l) of your partition table. if you wipe your partition table by accident, you can just use fdisk and recreate the table again

hope this helps

jacks4u

Thought about mentioning that, but I wan't sure if it only used the in-storage copy.
Never used it. Guess I'm going to have to set up a "trashable" system to test all these things

i wish i knew that before i reformatted all of my things

Well, yes. The command string you listed will ONLY erase your MBR. That is what it did. It zeroed your MBR.

It did exactly what you told it to do.

Oh, I almost forgot. Guess what is found in the MBR.

Give up? I'll tell you then.

The partition table.

You erased your partition table.

Don't worry. It can be reconstructed. Get a copy of parted and run it.

Ooooopppsssss!!!!

I missed this one line response before my last post.

I feel your pain. Really I do. But I'm laughing anyway.

Next time, be SURE what you're doing. Of course, at this point, you don't need to be told that.

hahahahaha, well, after having losing all of my newest Linux downloads as well as alot of stuff which I downloaded and being stuck with 56k, it's not too much of a problem. Slackware is actually going much faster than it is now.

Lessons learned:

There's almost always a way to fix a gone-bad-system, without re-fomatting, re-installing. find that way, and save your data, configuration, and settings.

jack4u.