Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!ginosko!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!ast
From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Corrupting DOS partition
Message-ID: <3613@ast.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 9 Oct 89 10:47:19 GMT
References: <5033@ogccse.ogc.edu>
Reply-To: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Organization: VU Informatica, Amsterdam
Lines: 19

In article <5033@ogccse.ogc.edu> lyle@ogccse.UUCP (Lyle Cool) writes:
>Last night I was making several boot disks with various hard disk drivers
>when I typed the following line:
>	build bootblok kernel mm fs init fsck /dev/hd0   instead of
>	build bootblok kernel mm fs init fsck /dev/fd0
>
>This one-letter-mistake basically trashed my hard disk, DOS partition and all.

Sorry about that.  There are two remedies I can think of.  First of all,
keep /dev/hdx as owned by the root or bin and mode 600.  This prevents
mere mortals from causing trouble.  If you are superuser, you have to be
careful.

Second, I think it is a good idea to copy /dev/hd0 to a floppy.  Only
360K, 720K, 1.2M, or 1.44M will fit, depending on your
floppy, but restoring this, even it is old, helps a lot.  Fsck can
fix up the rest.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)