Re: Debian Kills Disks
Jerry,
It would be *very* helpful if you could include the exact error
messages that you get, word-for-word, what you were doing when you
received them, and how to reproduce. Otherwise, we really have no
idea what to do to fix.
However, you can wipe out the partition table and master boot record
on your disk and restart. WARNING: THIS COMMAND WILL DESTROY
EVERYTHING ON YOUR DISK. USE WITH CARE! Also, reboot immediately
after using it.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=10
Jerry Human <JerrBear@commkey.net> writes:
> Hello Debian Geeks:
>
> Before you get upset let me declare that I'm a Linux/Debian newbie geek
> wannabe. I've only recently (a month ago) became interested in Linux.
> I've spent most of the time reading everything I could find. I have
> d/led a few distros to get a feel of Linux. I have two computers, a
> 486DX50 VLB and a 386DX40. The 486 is running PC DOS 7.0 and Win95, 40x
> CD and SB 16 Pro that is my main box for doing almost everything
> including surfing the net. The 386 is my test box that I'm trying to get
> Linux to run on but it doesn't have a CD or modem. Consequently, I have
> obtained everything I have for Linux on the Win95 box and transferred to
> the 386 via floppy.
>
> I've made the floppies (Rescue, Drivers, 5 base disks for Debian)
> following the instructions in the .txt files and Howto's on the 486 in
> DOS using Rawrite for them and used the disks to install Debian several
> times as I would learn more and realize I had left something out or
> wanted to try something different. These seem to be the most stable
> floppies I have made in Debian. Needless to say, Debian would succeed
> more times than any of the other distros, including RedHat.
>
> Obviously, I spent most of my time working/learning Debian. However,
> after using a floppy two or three times, it became unusable in any OS.
> This I attributed to normal attrition, even though the attrition rate
> was a lot higher than in any of the other OS's. Now the hard drive in
> the 386 has become unusable.
>
> Even Debian is refusing to install properly on it, the last semi
> successful install attempt resulted in a Read Only partial install that
> won't boot from the hard disk and a floppy boot won't access the hard
> disk. I believe that Debian has "signed" the boot partition in some way
> to make the disk(s) unusable. In other words, a software flag or
> partition id was written to the disk in a way that was not completely
> correct. How can I correct this? Is there a Hex editor I could use to
> clear the boot sector of the disk so a new install would work correctly?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> --
> Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null
Reply to: