doc: recovering broken drives (#705)

Sometimes a flash error ends up taking the user's drive in a state that
can't be easily recover with usual disk utility tools. For when this
happens, we add some documentation about fail-proof methods to recover
the drive.

Signed-off-by: Juan Cruz Viotti <jviotti@openmailbox.org>
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Juan Cruz Viotti 2016-09-15 08:49:35 -07:00 committed by GitHub
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@ -118,7 +118,56 @@ In Windows:
set ETCHER_DISABLE_UPDATES=1
```
Recovering broken drives
------------------------
Sometimes, things might go wrong, and you end up with a half-flashed drive that
is unusable by your operating systems, and common graphical tools might even
refuse to get it back to a normal state.
To solve these kinds of problems, we've collected a list of fail-proof methods
to completely erase your drive in major operating systems.
### Windows
In Windows, we'll use [diskpart], a command line utility tool that comes
pre-installed in all modern Windows versions.
- Open `cmd.exe` from either the list of all installed applications, or from
the "Run..." dialog usually accessible by pressing Ctrl+X.
- Type `diskpart.exe` and press "Enter". You'll be asked to provide
administrator permissions, and a new prompt window will appear. The following
commands should be run **in the new window**.
- Run `list disk` to list the available drives. Take note of the number id that
identifies the drive you want to clean.
- Run `select disk N`, where `N` corresponds to the id from the previous step.
- Run `clean`. This command will completely clean your drive by erasing any
existent filesystem.
### OS X
Run the following command in `Terminal.app`, replacing `N` by the corresponding
disk number, which you can find by running `diskutil list`:
```sh
diskutil eraseDisk free UNTITLED /dev/diskN
```
### GNU/Linux
Make sure the drive is unmounted (`umount /dev/xxx`), and run the following
command as `root`, replacing `xxx` by your actual device path:
```sh
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc
```
[resin.io]: https://resin.io
[appimage]: http://appimage.org
[xwayland]: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html
[weston.ini]: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/wily/man5/weston.ini.5.html
[diskpart]: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770877(v=ws.11).aspx