problem with dd and usb drive

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-11-18 at 18:55 +0000, Kahn Seidl wrote:
> I have a problem, i have a fat32 usb drive, which im using to back up a dns 
> server.
> 
> i first started to use cp -r * /mnt/usbdrive
> 
> then i stopped, and wanted to do it a better way
> 
> so i did a dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024k
> 
> it finishes too quickly and says 47+1 in    47+1 out
> 
> and now when i ls the /mnt/usbdrive
> 
> I get all sorts of garbage, lots of ?s and such.  and numbers.  when i try 
> to delete it, it says its a read only drive.
> 
> also to note, that at first, fdisk said there was one partition as fat32.  
> nwo there are several and i have no idea how they got there.
> 
> the last thing is this - i can now not umount the /dev/sda1  it says the 
> device is busy, eject doesnt work either.  I turned it off, and i still cant 
> unmount it, what should I do?  i really dont want to reboot it, it is our 
> dns server.  so?
> 
----
I hope that there wasn't anything on the dos partition that you wanted
to keep since it is now toast.

running dd like that did what you told it to do...over writing
the /dev/sda1 partition with a copy of whatever was on /dev/hda1

I suppose issuing the 'mount' command would tell you what was
on /dev/hda1

You probably have no choice but to clean up the usb drive with fdisk...

fdisk /dev/sda
as at least the first partition has been clobbered.

h # help
p # print (though this might be phony since it will read the
           partition table and the contents may not match)

Craig

PS...You might have had an easier time of it if you had just done...

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/sda1/backup_device_hda1.dd-file

Craig


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