Don’t Drink and Su

Charles Miller goofed:

I meant to type: dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/fd0. I typed dd if=rescue.bin of=/dev/hda. I have utterly destroyed the partition table on my primary hard drive. I have no backups. I am so completely fucked.

Don’t drink and su.

But later, Linux made it all better:

I overwrote the first megabyte of my primary hard drive. That’s the boot sector, the partition table, and a large chunk of the start of my root filesystem. I have now recovered to the point where I believe (believe, but have not tested) I can reboot the system and have it come up in one piece. I’ve recovered my partition layout and built a new table. I’ve fscked the root filesystem and restored the obvious damage. I was even able to backup /home to another drive, just in case the recovery hasn’t been as successful as I thought.

Respect the OS:

Ask any Unix system administrator, and they’ll tell you about the one time they stopped respecting the OS. Unix respects you, it trusts you, because the only way to gain trust and respect is to offer it yourself.

Congrats for a successful recovery.