I had an ext3 partition. I ran a dd command like this:dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/part2 bs=1024 count=15000 seek=various valuesWhere various values are basically 0, 15000K, 30000K etc.The point is I ran the dd command on the entire partition.Now the partition won't mount. I get an error Can't find ext3 partition on ...Questions:What exactly happened to the partition? I know it got corrupted, but what exactly happened? As a clue fsck /dev/part2 gives The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem.How do I format it back to ext3?
What happened to my ext3 partition
linux;filesystems;dd
You overwrote and/or corrupted superblock(s), and likely other data, with the data from /dev/urandom. Superblocks are important; they contain filesystem metadata.You can format it back to ext3 by issuing mkfs.ext3 /dev/part2.