recover from a bad F16 install

[Paul Allen Newell]

On 3/17/2012 8:03 PM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
>
>> I have an install DVD that I used to do a fresh install of F16 onto a
>> i386/686 machine. I then used it to do a fresh install of a second
>> machine. Midway through the formatting/partitioning, it "popped up a
>> bug". When I reported it, it pointed me to 743778 which was closed as
>> "notabug". At that point, the machine was at some unknown state in its
>> formatting.
>>
>> I now have a machine that is "a brick". There is no operating system on
>> it as that got destroyed and any attempts to do a fresh install come
>> back with "No usable disks have been found" and I can't make any
>> progress. Nothing could be done in the troubleshoot options except get a
>> dmesg, which I have attached to this email.
>>
>> Is this one of these times where I need to get something like
>> partedmagic and figure out how to format/partition from there? If so,
>> anyone done this before and can give pointers. If not, what other
>> options do I have.
>
>
> You need to visit www.sysresccd.org  and download the iso. Burn to a 
> CD or install unto a USB drive (instructions on the website). It has 
> all of the nice tools you need and runs as a 'live-cd' to allow you to 
> fix things.
>
> Note that if you got to the partitioning portion of the Fedora16 
> install, and let anaconda set the partitioning, then it is now using 
> gpt and not the usual mbr scheme. Recovery back to an ms-dos style mbr 
> is not difficult but takes a number of steps.
>
> G.
>
>

G.:

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to look into it and Tim's fdisc 
suggestion.

You would think an installation DVD which runs the risk of failure 
during format/partitioning would have an "emergency" troubleshooting 
option to get the machine back to a minimal sane state (assuming there 
is not a hardware failure .... and if that is what happened to me it is 
pretty amazing timing and you can obviously tell I have a choice way of 
defining "amazing")

Paul