Hard Drive does not show in lshw after mkfs
Submitted by getdown on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 20:16.
I am attempting to image a dying hard drive using ddrescue and was following the instructions posted here by Andrew: http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/node/90 and have run into an issue. When I boot into Ubuntu Rescue, the target drive is shown in lshw as /dev/sda however once I make the file system with [sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda] the drive is no longer listed in lshw and I can not mount the file system. The prompt shows that I am in the home directory, and making the mnt dir creates it there, and /dev/sda no longer exists.
The only way I can get the target drive to re-appear in lshw is to boot into windows, mount the drive, initialize and re-format it.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong, any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Normally, a drive is
Normally, a drive is partitioned. To access the whole drive, you use "/dev/sda". To access a partition, you would use "/dev/sda1". The command "sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda" puts a filesystem on the entire drive starting from the first block. The first block is where the partition table is. So when you do this, you wipe out the partition table of the drive and that's why the drive disappears.
What I assume you want to do is format the first partition (or only partition) on the drive so you would run
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
Make sure that's the correct drive so that you don't blow away any important data.
Thank you Andrew.
Thank you Andrew.