[syslinux] Used mkdiskimage script on wrong drive!

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Sun May 11 11:25:09 PDT 2008


Muller, SA, Mnr <14908832 at sun.ac.za> wrote:
> I was trying to setup dsl (damn small linux) to boot off a usb drive. I found my BIOS wasn't booting from it when using a USB-HDD mode so I found a page for using SYSLINUX to set it up in USB-ZIP mode (http://syslinux.zytor.com/usbkey.php).
> 
> I made a mistake and (doing exactly what the page warned against not doing) used the mkdiskimage command on the wrong drive (a 230Gb NTFS external hard-drive). I typed 'sudo ./mkdiskimage -4 /dev/sdb 243 64 32' instead of typing /dev/sdc (for my 250mb usb drive) and now all my data on my external drive is inaccessable from Linux and Windows.
> 
> I haven't performed any other read,write,partition (or format) commands since running the mkdiskimage script.
> 
> Is there anyway to undo (or even partially undo) what I've done?
> 

Urk.  You have erased 250 MB of your 230 GB disk.  So you'd need a 
program which can recover NTFS with significant damage.  It might help 
if you can recreate the partition as it originally was, but I don't know 
all that much about NTFS recovery utilities (however, see the other post 
in this thread.)

The good news is that a recovery program should have a relatively easy 
time telling the good from the bad.

	-hpa




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