Hello Folks,

I've got a USB enclosure for a hard drive. A while ago, I tried a rather dumb use of backing up with the dd command, and the partition table makes no sense. There was no important data on the drive, so all I want is the disk itself.

However, I can't get a filesystem or a partition back on it. If I run any manner of fdisk on the device (/dev/sdc), it exits with no output. If I run parted (many commands), I get the same results. sfdisk, same thing. cfdisk, same thing.

Is that hard drive a paperweight now? Is there some way I can tell it to rewrite the damn thing from the beginning?

Thanks in advance.

-Sam

First, with linux, no news is good news.(generally)

Have you tried to write to the drive since the format? (you did not mention that)

Just a thought.

I would suggest that you erase the partitions, reboot, then create a/any partition/s.

If the master boot record (mbr) is damaged, or that part of the drive has bad sectors,

then you may be able to re-initialise it as a new drive, but with bad sectors marked, so the bad sectors are not written to in the future.


I use qtparted(gui), available on live cd's like knoppix and mepis.


see how you go.