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Hello , I mistakenly formatted my pen drive , with the command
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb
instead of mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
it warned me about formatting the whole device, but I ignored it . and now my pen drive has been permanently modified. The capacity is reduced to 940MB from 990MB . MOre importantly I can't boot from this pen drive anymore
What to do? , how to totally wipe out the pen drive? I tried using gparted , but it didn't work..
When you created the file system, you over-wrote the partition table. Use fdisk to create a new partition table with a single partition, covering the entire drive.
Most USB drives are formatted with a FAT file system, not ext3.
Hello , I mistakenly formatted my pen drive , with the command
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb
instead of mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
it warned me about formatting the whole device, but I ignored it . and now my pen drive has been permanently modified. The capacity is reduced to 940MB from 990MB . MOre importantly I can't boot from this pen drive anymore
What to do? , how to totally wipe out the pen drive? I tried using gparted , but it didn't work..
Thanks
If you want to totally wipe your data, use the command 'dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb' That will overwrite your entire drive with random bits.
After that, use fdisk to rebuild your partition(s), then rebuild your filesystem.
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