Reformatting external HDD in Linpus

Hi everyone. Ive been reading around on the site since a while before i got my system, and now i've got a question to ask. Hopefully someone has had the same issue and knows what can be done.

Upon receiving my system, i managed to hose it the first night. I was scrambling to find a usb odd or flash drive, and decided to try using the Linpus restore disc to create a usb restore on my external hdd. Dumb, i know. Now the drive will not allow writing or changing of the files on it, and it is recognized by the OS as 'usbinstall'.

I tried Gparted to delete the bootable image from the hdd and got this error message:
"GParted 0.3.3

Libparted 1.8.6

Delete sdb1 (unknown, 465.76 GiB) from sdb ( ERROR )

calibrate sdb1 00:00 ( ERROR )
libparted messages ( INFO )

Could not stat device sdb - No such file or directory."

Does anyone see something i'm doing wrong, or know a better approach to the problem?

Thanks for reading.

-wogga[attachment=0:3dnqpbp5]Gparted.png[/attachment:3dnqpbp5][attachment=0:3dnqpbp5]Gparted.png[/attachment:3dnqpbp5]

 

Maybe gparted is having a problem because it doesn't recognize the format? Can you format that partition with FAT32 or some other filesystem? If it allows that, try it as it's fast. Then close gparted, make sure drive is unmounted and start gparted again and see what shows up. Maybe then you can remove the partition and start fresh.

Worse comes to worse, I guess you could just zero out that hard drive ... wipe it all and replace everything with zeroes.

This will take some time on such a large hd, but it'll work:

Probably have to unmount it first.

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

Cheers.

 

I tried unmounting the drive, then reformatting (only options being ext2, ext3, and fat32); and tried deleting the image. niether worked.

I havent had the time yet to devote to zeroing, but will try later. Do i just enter "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb " in my root terminal line?

thanks for the help.

 

The image created by the Acer program is.. odd. cfdisk also seems unwilling to read the partition.

Maybe testdisk can delete it ?

 

Yeh, that will do it.

Cheers.

 

Probably no need to reformat the whole drive (which will take a long time). I recommend something like
"dd if=dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1024 count=100"

 

I was thinking the same thing. Actually, thinking that after letting it run for a bit, just stop it with CTRL-C. By that point enough of the corruptions has been zeroed out (mbr/partition table) to be able to then deal with the drive in a regular way.



Cheers.

 

Ok. I tried both DD commands, and im still having trouble. when i entered dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb, there was no response from the terminal. 'root@localhost user' went away, and hitting enter just linebreaked. typing exit simply typed the word exit. :?:

when i tried enteringthe bs and count, it just gave me a quick response and that was all.

can anyone see anything im doing wrong from the screenshots? does the lack of response in terminal mean i just have to wait til its done to receive further info? hope i dont sound like TOO much of a linux idiot.
thanks again for all the help, guys.

 

The first photo shows it completed and wrote the zeros.

The second photo ... well that one is doing the whole hard drive and can take much time on such a large drive. You'll just have to wait until it gets back to the command prompt with the second way (photo).

But as stated in previous msg, you probably don't need to do the whole drive just to zero out the mbr/partition table.

In any case, it's probably already done all that is necessary. Try and use gparted again and see whether you can create a new partition and format it.

Cheers.

 

I hit ctrl+c after it had been going for about 35 minutes, and youll see the messages from terminal in the screenshot.
I tried going into gparted and setting the disklabel, to no avail.

i also tried unmounting the drive, also to no avail.

Do i need to just go ahead and let it run through all 500gb?
Any and all suggestions are graciously welcomed, as im just stumped.

 

In gparted you have to FIRST create a partition on the drive. Then you can format the new partition which will be sdb1

Cheers.

 

gparted is not letting me create a partition without first setting a disk label.

 

Have you tried Device --> Disk Label?

Cheers.

 

Looks like Linpus thinks the HDD is a restore volume (USBINSTALL) and doesn't want to let you do nasty things to it. I don't know if the fdisk program in WinXP will reformat the drive, but you could certainly try booting a SystemRescueCD or Puppy Linux CD (or almost any other live Linux CD for that matter) on another computer with the external HDD attached and try again with gparted.

 

Have you tried .....

fdisk -l (this will list your disks)

Then

fdisk /dev/sdx (x = your disk number)

Then you can type m for help or d to delete a partition on the disk. Delete all the partitions and create a new one.

HTH

Neil