Error 39 When trying to make recovery USB

Okay, I was able to use Testdisk to recover the partition information of the killed MBR.
Thank you for that reminder.

It might be sufficient to use (use at your own risk)
$ lilo -M /dev/hdx
to re-write a Master Boot Record to that partition.

I checked the partition with
$ dd if=/dev/hdx of=filename bs=1k count=1
and indeed, the first blocks were filled with 0x00!

Regards,

ckoller

 

i have 3 HDDs. I just had one of their tables erased. I fixed it and called acer to complain. they told me it was because of a faulty disc. but i have another disc here. i want to try it simply so i can complain again. but i dont want it to possible delete the partition table of my only bootable hard drive. is this possible?

 

I just got my Acer One today and decided to use a script that I found to give my desktop a nicer look. Anyways, there was an error and it just loads to a black screen with a mouse cursor. So I go an try and make a recovery USB and I keep on getting an error 39. Thankfully my main computer still has its partitions and everything but man, after trying 3 different usb drives it still doesn't work. I tried a kingston 8gb, which didn't work so I returned it for a 4gb which also didn't work and then I tried using a usb adaptor on my kingston 8gb sdhc card and still nothing.

Maybe its a kingston thing, maybe the recovery CD has driver problems with my motherboard. I'm going to try the method mentioned above to make a recovery disk from windows, not thrilled about doing it that way, but I want my acer one back :x

Update, I did kill my second harddrive :evil:

 

I called them up when this happened, They told me that i was a faulty disc. I got someone to speak to a 'senior tech guy' and they still sai it was a faulty disc. Thing is i have another disc but I'm not gunna use it incase it breaks my primary hard drive. But, im pretty certain its no faulty disc.
You should call acer support, just so that they have the problem on record, because when i called the guy told me he had only ever heard of this happening once before (deleting partition table) yet it is blatently a common problem...

 

Ditto.

Machine bought in the new year. It's still happening.

I have weekly backups but the prospect of losing a few day's data isn't much fun. Acer really should instruct retailers to remove these DVDs immediately. Some people, many people less tech savvy might not even suspect the DVD was faulty, lose stacks of Photos / Home videos etc. It's a matter of social responsibility.

 

I had exactly the same problem, and googling led me to this site.

Thanks a lot! It seems to have worked like a charm, i'll let you know if i manage to boot from my USB drive. Thanks again.

 

Glad I found this post, I only realized that my failed attempt to create a recovery usb was the reason my 2nd drive on the household computer had died, when i read it. You would think that the support staff at acer would know about it though, or maybe they do and the company doesnt want to admit liability for any lost data.
Very annoying though. Looks like I will be buying a usb dvd drive if i manage to kill my aspire.