[ALUG] Help me to help someone!

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Sat, 2007-07-07 at 15:28 +0100, ted.harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:

> So he re-ran the "sudo" command (beginning with "s") from within
> fdisk, and in fdisk: "s   create a new empty Sun disklabel".
> 
> Now he writes to the forum:
> 
>   "Yesterday I installed ntfs-3g and now Ubuntu allows me to
>    read and write to usb hard drives and usb pendrives which
>    it would not before BUT although I enabled both read and
>    write of internal and external drives the internal second
>    hard drive as now vanished altogether."
> 
> Is this a case of OUCH!??
> 

It doesn't look good, but that said I just tried replicating his
keystrokes and unless he also hit w at some point it *shouldn't* have
nuked his partition. Although it is anyone's guess at this point what
keys he was pressing to try and exit the Sun Disklabel prompts.

I'd suggest you get him to run 

sudo fdisk -l /dev/hdb

So we can see what that disk now thinks it has as partitions. There are
steps that can be taken to recover the disk contents if all he has done
is nuked the partition table.

After being in a very similar situation with a newcomer myself in the
past, I tend now to be very careful about which commands I suggest to
run if I am dealing with someone whose skills I am not sure of.

Asking him to do an fdisk -l or vol_id is far far safer than getting him
to navigate the commands from the fdisk prompt as both of the above
merely list the information we need and then exit. fdisk has bitten many
a pro, let alone a newcomer :)