[Resolved] Little Help with Unbricking

[moonman]

Well you have a mess on the drive. Hybrid MBR is gone, MBR has overlapping partitions - I don't even know how that is possible. looks like your data partition is gone and there's no way to recover it unless you know exactly how it was partitioned before. If you dom then delete current MBR table and create a new one which is exactly the same as your old in terms of partition size. Your data should still be on there.

IF you don't care about the data, just cretae a completely new partition table and extract tarball on to the first one given that you are booted from the USB stick.

[Oogbored]

I don't care about the data at this point, as far as I can tell it still only gives me data on the flashdrive itself based on the file sizes, and I'm only seeing one drive designation. What command do I need to do to mount the device and repartition?

[moonman]

The drive has to be unmounted to partition it. Can't remember if you upgraded the U-Boot or not.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'gdisk /dev/sda')

press "d' to remove a partition, and repeat until all partitions are gone

Then press "n" to create a new partition. 1st partition should be the rootfs, the rest you can arrange as you want. For partition size specify +20G or less for the 1st one and the rest like you want.

Now you should have GPT partition table ready, but you need HMBR.

press "r" for "recovery and transformation options"
press "h"
Partitions for MBR: just type in "1" (or "1, 2" if you have second swap partition)
Place EFI GPT (0xEE) partition first in MBR (good for GRUB)? anser "N"
everything else leave at default.

Press "m" to go back to main menu
Press "w" to write out thechagnes

Now create filesystem with "mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1"
Label it rootfs "tune2fs -L "rootfs" /dev/sda1"

Mount it "mount /dev/sda1 /mnt"
Cd into it "cd /mnt"
Download tarball "wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM ... est.tar.gz"
Extract it "tar xvzf ArchLinuxARM-armv5te-latest.tar.gz"

run "sync"

Hopefully it will boot if you didn't modify U-Boot parametes

[Oogbored]

Don't believe we modified the uboot. Having to rebuild a usb to load from. I attempted to format the main drive, needed to restart since it was giving me issues; its possible that sda is the flash drive, since when I looked at it it had 3 partition on it and wouldn't boot anymore. Ubuntu is giving me issues telling me I don't own either of the flash drives I'm attempting to use. Bleh.

[moonman]

In Ubuntu you need to use "sudo <command>" or "sudo su" and then runn all commands as root. Why are you using ubuntu though? I thought you could boot the device from a flash drive.

[Oogbored]

I could until I attempted to fix the drive last night. The usb died last night when I went to restart, as I said it had been partitioned into 3 chunks, making me believe that the goflex is only seeing the flash drive and mounting it as sda.

[moonman]

If you have sata drive inserted while booting it will detect it as sda. If you insert it after boot then it will be sdb. IT doesn't matter how many partitions you have as they all will be sda1 sda2 ... (or sdb).
IT is sdXY where X is the physical drive and Y is the partition number

[Oogbored]

I've been inserting it after boot, and only one drive seems to show up in the readouts as sda. I'll try with it inserted during boot of the usb drive once I get a working one again that is.

[Oogbored]

After the trials and tribulations of creating a new Linux build of Kubuntu, I have a new usb build up and running. Booted this time with both drives in, and as before, only 1 drive shows up, and seeing as it is 1004.0 MiB it seems to be my 1 gig flash drive from which the system is running. The 3TB drive is nowhere to be found, even though it spins up when powered on.

[moonman]

can you show output of "dmesg". Also full output of "fdisk -l"