On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:11 PM, Marcus Wanner <marc...@cox.net> wrote: > On 11/19/2009 3:22 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote: >> >> I suspect you did nothing wrong and that the problem is either a >> coincidental hardware failure or something the owner did to the stick >> after you returned it. Convincing the owner of that is another matter. >> > > I am pretty sure that this is the case. The fact that the partition table is > no longer valid is very interesting, and I would be interested in seeing the > first 512 bytes (I believe that is where the partition table resides) of the > dd image, if you can make one, just to see if it's corrupt or has been > correctly erased. The fact that there is 2 TB left according to gparted > leads me to believe that it is corrupt, which would mean that it is probably > a hardware failure, and nothing to do with Linux, as someone else said. > > Good luck with that student, here's hoping there was nothing important on > that drive when it died! > > Marcus
On the bright side, if ONLY the partition table was corrupt, maybe re-creating it with fdisk might make the data accessible again. You might also try a tool like dfsee which might be able to analyse or extract some partiton/FAT data from it.
