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A comment on Suicide Linux. Parent comment

Re:Suicide Linux by peckrob on Thursday October 26, 2017 @11:28PM (#15565492)
A few months back I was wiping some old drives using a USB->SATA adapter plugged into an old Linux machine I keep around for experimenting on random things. Mostly because I could just leave it to run for however long it took. There were two drives in the machine, sda and sdb. So the drive came up as sdc.

So then I typed:

$ shred -n1 -v /dev/sda

Took me about 4 seconds to realize what I did before hitting Ctrl-C.

Then, I sighed. Considered whether I could save anything. Realized there wasn't anything on there worth saving, and reinstalled. :)

I'm usually much more cautious than that and I'm thankful it happened on a dumb test machine at home and not something important, but it was still a bummer and my first real sysadmin-type screw up. Mistakes happen, though. Even Linus once dialed his hard drive [0].

[0] https://liw.fi/linux-anecdotes/

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Re:Suicide Linux by tscs37 on Friday October 27, 2017 @01:00AM (#15565826)
Stuff like this is why I usually double check and only access disk by anything but the /dev/sdx or /dev/hdx labels; too easy to blow up in your face.
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Re:Suicide Linux by tcprst on Friday October 27, 2017 @05:23AM (#15566841)
Shortly after I started using Fedora as my daily driver I was attempting to dd if=/dev/zero the MBR and partition table off a USB disk sdb and accidentally wiped the one off of sda instead.

As luck would have it, I had the output of fdisk -l /dev/sda in my terminal scrollback buffer and was able to recreate the partition table with no damage done.

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