Danger .. restore DVD trashes drives! (sdb)

I've tinkered bit with my AA1 ... I ordered a new 2Gb stick to make a USB stick to reinstall it .
I believe the instructions are something simple like 'stick the DVD in the drive, the USB stick in the slot and reboot)

1: Didn't put the USB stick in 1st ... booted from DVD .. plugged in USB .. not found ... start again
2: Plug in USB , boot from DVD ... found new USB disk ... chose option to create a restore USB system ... fails with error 39 (contact linpus) (ATA drives)
3: Try another machine ... same pattern, error39 (SATA drives)

4: Give up and reboot 2nd machine (to google for the problem ) fails to boot ... filesystem not found (half a raid in my case)
5: Go back to the 1st machine, reboot ... grub fails (can't find menus.lst)

...after a lot of messing around I discover that /dev/sdb has been trashed on both machines ...this is (in both cases) the 2nd harddisk.

It looks like that despite any choice you might make it always seems to trash the second harddisk ...if you only had one drive this would probably be the USB stick.

BTW...if this happens to you see http://www.sysresccd.org/Download ... I managed to get mine back (7 file-systems on the 2nd drive for system1, half a raid setup for the 2nd system)

 

Weird - I have created my USB Recovery key on a machine with 2 and wih 4 physical harddisks installed, and not had that happen to me. Are you sure you didn't by error select the install option, and not the create USB key recovery option ?

 

I can confirm. It happened to me, too. Corrupted a 2nd ATA hard drive and a MyBook external USB drive. The DVD is dangerous.

 

yes I can confirm that. I choose the option to make a USB.
I subsequently used a USB DVD drive with the AA1 built a 2Gb USB install stick and used that to re-install the AA1
... so I was doing what I thught I was doing ... just not on the AA1