Wiped drive won't boot

[phixt]

Alright...so I was going to wipe a new storage drive clean before I formatted it. I used "dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M". This should have worked fine...except sda1 was the wrong drive . I immediately stopped it once I realized it, but it was too late; the first 8MB of my root partition on my 36GB Raptor was wiped. Whoops. Now, every time I try to boot, a pattern of "99 99 99 99 99...." appears as the bios tries to boot the drive. I reformatted, repartitioned, and reinstalled Mandrake after getting my home partition backed up, but the drive still won't boot. Knoppix sees the directory structure fine.

Help! What did dd erase that's crucial to the boot process?

 

[ameoba]

When you reinstalled Mandrake, you probably forgot to set up the boot loader (lilo or grub).

The dd would have wiped the partition table & the MBR, but a reformat/reinstall should've saved that.

 

[phixt]

I had setup lilo, but evidently something that had been randomly written was still screwing up the boot process. I fixed this by doing "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/[drive] bs=512 count=1" to zero the MBR, and then reinstalling mandrake again. This time lilo worked as normal and the drive boots fine now

thanks

 

[ameoba]

you probably could have gotten away with just making sure that your lilo.conf was correct & reinstalling the bootloader...

 

[phixt]

you probably could have gotten away with just making sure that your lilo.conf was correct & reinstalling the bootloader...

Yeah, I have a feeling that would have worked...oh well, now I know nothing important is missing, could have caused problems later if some script or util was gone