[GRLUG] weird USB problem

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 02:58:00AM -0500, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=1' as root, against the
> unmounted drive (not partition) will solve your problem.  Of course,
> you'll have to partition and format after that.  Fat and iso9660/ufs
> store filesystem data in slightly different spots, both near the
> beginning of the drive.  Doesn't help when the filesystem image is
> purposefully crafted to exploit that fact.

Oh, boy. This isn't making sense to me. I ran the above command against
the drive (/dev/sdb). fdisk then complained about a DOS label or
somesuch. I created a new partition since fdisk rightly claimed there
was no partition. As soon as I wrote the changes my box mounted the
drive and the lone file that had been on the drive before I wiped it
clean and created a new partition is still on the drive and is
accessible. This is weird. The original problem is gone, though (only
one partition now).
-- 
john-thomas
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Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist (1825-1895)