Formatting a disk

[Daniel Carrera]

Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
>>Does anyone have a rescue suggestion? (yes, I should have done a backup of hdb's MBR but I didn't). There must be a tool
>>that can bring sanity to a disk with a broken MBR.
> 
> Rescue what, exactly?  You should be able to reformat the disk with:
>    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb count=1   (or 16k, for kicks)
>    fdisk /dev/hdb
>    (etc)

I meant, get it to the point where I can use fdisk again and continue 
working. fdisk and qtparted both failed. But I've solved this now. 
sfdisk was able to fix the partition table, so I could use fdisk again.

Could you explain why I would do 16k? I was thinking that I'd want to do 
as little as possible to avoid breaking the partition table (which seems 
to be what made fdisk fail in the first place).

Best,
Daniel.
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