Hello everyone and thank you for any help you can offer.

I had a dual-boot setup with Windows XP and Fedora 19. I was attempting to reformat some USB drives using fdisk. It seems I might have formatted my OS partitions instead of the USB drives. I am confused about why that would happen, as I am certain I formatted only /dev/sdc1, albeit repeatedly. I had thought that sdc1 referenced my USB stick. In fdisk, I entered 'd' to delete the partition, then 'n', 'w'.

Now every time I try to boot, I see this:

Then

But

I'm guessing this is the F19 recovery partition from my previous f19 install?

I made a bootable F21 USB stick and tried it out. I got the Fedora Live menu, a bit of a pause, a very brief Fedora logo and then a huge amount of text. I cannot find a feature on this forum to post an image of the text. Here is a sample, with "..." used to indicate something that looks unimportant:

I am stuck. I tried looking into TestDisk, but couldn't figure it out. Any help much appreciated!

UPDATE:

I realized I was never running F20 but actually just F19. I entered the following commands:

and was taken to my usual GRUB boot menu. Three different versions of Fedora 19 were listed, plus Fedora 19 Rescue and Windows NT/2000/XP (loader) (on /dev/sda1). I chose Fedora 19 Rescue and waited a long time at the Fedora load screen before being taken back to

The same messages appear when I choose any of the other three Fedora options from the GRUB menu. When I choose Windows , GRUB reports
UPDATE 2:
Since I guess I destroyed /root, I’m going the Fedora Live boot route. This time I chose /Troubleshooting/Test this media & start Fedora Live from the Fedora Live menu. Here is the result:

UPDATE 3:

This problem is killing me. Now the USB drives are no longer booting at all. Cannot reach Fedora Live menu. I tried three different drives and exFAT, FAT and Mac OS Extended filesystems. I am stuck using a Mac to format the sticks so maybe I should borrow a PC. grub rescue is showing the USB as two extra, unusable partitions (hd2) and (hd2,msdos1).

Welcome to linuxQuestions.

With the latest distributions device Ids i.e. /dev/sdxy can be assigned to any disk since the filesystems are typically referenced by their UUID or label. So before using any command that requires /dev/sdxy verify that it is indeed the correct drive and partition.

It appears that you deleted the /boot partition which contains all the kernel and bootloader files which is why you see just the grub-rescue prompt. If all you did was delete the /boot partition then recreating it via fdisk should fix the problem since the filesystem is still intact. If you reformatted after deleting the partition then some files may be lost and it might be easier to reinstall. You should still be able to access /(root) in rescue mode assuming its partition is still intact to save data and configuration files.

Which F21 image did you download ?. How did you download/burn it ?. Did you verify it after download ?.
Detailed answers.
You need to get that sorted so you can work on the machine, and see what can be salvaged.

syg00,

I downloaded the 64-bit version, verified the checksum as recommended on getfedora.org, and used dd on a Mac to create a bootable USB.

michaelk,

Each time I tried to reformat through fdisk with 'd' 'n' 'w'. Then I unmounted the USB drive and did mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdc1 .

I'm guessing the "unknown filesystem" indicates the /root partition was indeed destroyed?

I use similar method (dd on Linux though), and never had a problem - including F21.
The reason I asked is that the F19 files indicate a 32-bit version was installed, so it was possible you have non-64-bit hardware. I just tested, and the 64-bit download still complains about invalid architecture if booted on 32-bit, so you are obviously ok.

Did you download the Workstation iso ?.

*Edit:* problem is apparently not common, but not unknown - see this

It isn't necessary to delete / recreate the partition in order to format the filesystem.
We know your /boot partition has been destroyed not sure about the /(root) just yet.

Just my paisa of advice.

Always check the uuid of device before using a block device.

Always triple check block devices before using a command that writes to it.

If you are unsure which device represents which block device. You can atleast check it's size with command 'blockdev'.

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UPDATE:

I realized I was never running F20 but actually just F19. I entered the following commands:

and was taken to my usual GRUB boot menu. Three different versions of Fedora 19 were listed, plus Fedora 19 Rescue and Windows NT/2000/XP (loader) (on /dev/sda1). I chose Fedora 19 Rescue and waited a long time at the Fedora load screen before being taken back to

The same messages appear when I choose any of the other three Fedora options from the GRUB menu. When I choose Windows , GRUB reports
More to come…hope this can help someone one day.

If you created usb boot device, enter bios change the boot priority to the usb device. It's most likely listed under hdd's in bios.
bios>>Boot>>hdd's

EDDY1,

Thank you for your reply. Although boot priority is not the issue (I have indeed already set priority 1 to USB), I just came across something interesting. I will update the original post with my finding.

Most new usb Devices are listed as hdd's not usb devices.

It is much easier to understand the chain of events if you add a reply with your findings vs updating the original post.

In a nutshell using dd will create the same filesystem as in the file itself so formatting prior will have no affect. What is the exact command you are using?

1 members found this post helpful.

Here is the command I am running to create the bootable media:

That will be fairly slow - and you have to make sure you don't pull the USB out before it is finished writing. I always use "oflag=sync" to force write to actual physical media. Makes things even (a little) slower, but safer.