Serious bug in !SDCreate

There is a serious bug in !SDCreate. Do not use it on the ARMini until this has been fixed.

I downloaded the pandaboard ROM image with SDCreate, put a blank SD card into the front slot on the ARMini and ran SDCreate to write the image to the SDcard. Instead it has wiped the boot disc and reduced its capacity from a 16Gbyte pen drive to 32Mbytes.

I now need to find out how to recover my data on the boot drive so that my ARMini will work again. Any suggestions please?

I’ve just tried this and it didn’t wipe the boot drive for me. However, it looks like the “Save options” option doesn’t restore the SCSI drive number, so that could have been what caused the problem for you. I’ll work on getting that fixed, and add some checks to make sure people can’t overwrite their boot drives.

As for recovering your data, I’m not sure what options you have available. SDCreate will have only overwritten the first 32MB of the disc, so a lot of it will still be there, but I’m not sure what would be required to reconstruct enough of the start of the disc to allow it to be recovered. Maybe DiscKnight can cope with these situations?

The latest ROM image downloads now contain a new version of SDCreate that saves the SCSI drive number properly, and pops up warning box(es) before writing to card (one generic warning message, and another one if it looks like you’re about to overwrite your boot drive).