Hard drive geometry headache (slightly off topic)

[Siegbert Baude]

Frederick Bowes wrote:
> I've solved the problem and repreat it here for future generations reference
> (: It appears that the MBR was infact corrupt, causing fdisk to get
> confused...
> the following command made the hd appear blank and let it all work again:
> 
>   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 count=2000
> 
> (Yes i lost my data but the drive now works!) Thanks for ur help (:

It would be more precise to use

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=1

as this will delete exactly the first block of the first IDE-disk, aka 
MBR. If your MBR is corrupt, but you still care for the data, you have 
better chances to recover this way.

Ciao
Siegbert