Re: Oops - copied iso image to wrong device

[mark ryan <markryan216@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 10:00 AM, Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:

On Sun 13 Oct 2013 at 00:54:44 +0000, mark ryan wrote:

> I was creating a bootable USB stick from an installer image on another
> external hard drive. I did a cat debian-7.1.0-i386-netinst.iso > /dev/sdb
> when I meant /dev/sdc. sdb was my external drive with the iso on it, and
> other files. I am now unable to mount that drive. What, if anything, can I
> do to recover that drive?

The data on the drive are gone. Do

   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb count=10000

to remove all traces of the iso you put on it and start from scratch.

Thanks Brian, but I can just fdisk and mkfs this one. It is an external drive that is only used for file storage. I may try scapel, but I'll probably just reformat and restore when I get home.