how does one un dd a hard drive? [Debian 12 - Bookworm] (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by laverabe@lemmy.world to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

...because I'm an idiot. Fortunately it was a backup drive, and I believe the only thing on it was backups of backups fortunately.

I was setting up to installing Debian on another computer and ran:

sudo dd bs=4M if=debian-12.4.0-amd64-DVD-1.iso of=/dev/s?? status=progress oflag=sync

to flash it to a usb drive. I hadn't realized the system had reassigned hard drive device ID from the previous day, and for about 3 seconds it executed before I terminated the process once I realized what I did.

I immediately created a disk image of the Data-Destroyed hard drive just in case I screwed something up in trying to recover it.

I ran testdisk, but I'm not really sure how to use it or how to try to recover the data. The drive mounts okay, and shows it has 19,336 items totalling 8.2 GB of the Debian system files.

Is this beyond repair?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 9 months ago

DD nuked the partition info and the first several hundred megabytes of data.

Next time, I would suggest setting up Ventoy so you don't have to dd iso files to the flash drive anymore.

[-] laverabe@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Yeah that's the first thing I wrote in my notes, to stay far far away from dd.

Ventoy isn't in the Debian repos, but I did find a similar program there - Gnome multi writer. I've used unetbootin in the past on Ubuntu, but Debian instructions specifically say not to use a program like unetbootin for some reason. I'll give the multi writer a shot the next time I do a fresh install, thanks for the tip!

[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 months ago

Ventoy isn't something you need to install on your system. It's a boot loader that gets installed on a flash drive. You can just copy ISO files to the flash drive and pick which one you want from the boot menu.

MultiWriter is basically just doing the same thing dd does, but with a GUI.

this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024

19 points (100.0% liked)

techsupport

2239 readers

70 users here now

The Lemmy community will help you with your tech problems and questions about anything here. Do not be shy, we will try to help you.

If something works or if you find a solution to your problem let us know it will be greatly apreciated.

Rules: instance rules + stay on topic

Partnered communities:

You Should Know

Software gore

Recommendations

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

GatoB@lemmy.world