I’ve been getting into single board computers, and I’ve overwritten my external hard drive twice now trying to flash OS images to SD cards from my Linux PC using dd (good thing my important data is backed up). To be fair, it’s totally my fault, but I’m curious if anyone else has done this.
I’ve heard people call it Disk Destroyer for that reason lol
Yeah, it’s very easy to mix up /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. Did it once and have PTSD from it, I triple-check every time now and still feel uneasy every time.
Super paranoid about it, so it never happened to me ;)
Use “lsblk -o UUID,LABEL,NAME” and “/dev/disk/by-uuid/” next time.
there’s /Dev/disk-by/
look into that directory
Not yet, but I live in fear.
I did make the mistake of mounting a drive while I was in the middle of formatting another one. It just halted the operation so it wasn’t too bad, but I try to be more careful now.
I just always do an
fdisk -lbeforehand and doublecheck witch partition/drive I’m writing toIt never happened to me thankfully, I always check with lsblk first. Otherwise if you usually write distros to USB or SD cards, you should probably use safer tools, some have nice GUI.
No but when configuring dual-boot, I’ve deleted the Windows root or boot partition several times. Took me a bit to learn how to boot Windows with systemd-boot. I don’t write any ISO’s from my PC anymore. I use an app on my Android called EtchDroid. It’ll write any Linux ISO I’ve put through it. You just have to format the SD card in device care first.
I started doing this because I’ve rendered my system unbootable in the past. I bought an external USB-C to SD card adapter and it’s saved me a few times. Now that I built my system and configured it, I don’t have this issue. I used to keep multiple ISO’s on my Android I could write within seconds and then boot on my PC. dd is great if you have a system you keep ISO’s on
