Fedora Media Writer (FMW) unintentionally wiped second connected USB drive

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1

Hello everyone,

I use Fedora Media Writer (FMW) on three Fedora 43 Workstations and two Windows 11 Pro/10 Pro machines.

I recently used FMW to create a Rescuezilla bootable USB key.

However, I made a major oversight: I left an external NVMe drive connected via USB during the creation process. This unintentionally resulted in two separate bootable drives being created, despite me having specifically selected only the target USB key (Sandisk) within FMW.

To recover and restore the NVMe drive, I had to use FMW again because GParted was unable to unlock the partition situation and revert the drive.

My question is: Is this an occasional, isolated event, or is it a known/frequent issue with FMW when multiple external drives are connected?

Thank you for any insight or information.

2

Can you give a bit more detail here about exactly what operations FMW did on your USB NVMe drive? It sounds like you were able to restore the NVMe drive, so presumably FMW had not actually overwritten its content and partition table?

Or do you mean it did get wiped, and you just restored the data from a backup?

3

Hi @pg-tips
Thank you for your interest.
In short, I forgot that my NVMe drive (USB-C enclosure) was still attached to the system via USB. This NVMe disk contained my backup .img files (Windows 11 Pro / Fedora 43 WS system images created with Rescuezilla).
After the failed FMW operation, the NVMe drive became completely inaccessible on both Windows 11 and Fedora.
I tried to restore it using GParted (recreating the GPT partition table), but even after the operation, the drive still showed 1.92 GB as “used space” which I could not clear, and the drive remained unusable.
Only by using Fedora Media Writer (FMW) again to “Restore” the drive did I regain full use of the NVMe drive.
The central puzzle for me is that I expressly selected only the Sandisk USB key in the FMW menu. It appears FMW may attempt to write to multiple connected drives regardless of the user’s specific selection.

5

When you say “failed” - did it fail to write your image to the intended flash drive?

But the data previously on that drive was lost?

6

Yes, both drives were rendered unbootable.

The previous data on the NVMe drive was lost, but it wasn’t critical anyway. The system image I was about to create (of my entire PC’s NVMe drive) would have made the stored data obsolete. Furthermore, I use two other HDDs for system images that I use in rotation.

7

Thanks, got it.

I haven’t seen this reported before here. And one would certainly expect people to complain if this happened to them!

You could raise this in Bugzilla. If there are any relevant logs in journalctl from the time the issue happened, that would be helpful.

1 Like
8

Hi @pg-tips
Thank you for the quick reply.
I am what you might call a “passive user” of Fedora, and unfortunately, I do not know how to view the system logs using journalctl.
Furthermore, the incident happened about a week ago, and I don’t have an exact timestamp for when it occurred. Today, I also deleted the Rescuezilla .img file from my BACKUP partition. In addition, while I have successfully migrated about 75-80% of my workflow to Fedora, I still occasionally rely on Windows 11 Pro. Therefore, I cannot definitively rule out the possibility that the operation with FMW was performed on the Windows machine.
Thank you again for your patience and assistance.

9

It isn’t clear to me whether you were running FMW in Windows or Fedora. I once forgot to disconnect my backup drive when updating Windows 11 and ended up with a small partition on the drive containing Windows files. I’ve since encountered other reports of Windows deleting Linux partitions.

There is a Fedora introduction to journalctl, and lots of 3rd party tutorials. It takes some effort to learn how to filter out irrelevant entries when investigating a problem, but the relevant entries often point to a solution or (worst case) form the basis for a useful bug report.

2 Likes
10

Hi @gnwiii
Thank you for your detailed input, which I always appreciate.
I’ve been following the project since the Red Hat 6.x days. However, the PC in question is a mandatory corporate work machine that must run Windows. I prefer using Fedora for its reliability, and I have configured both systems similarly.
When you ask me which OS I was using at the time of the incident, I cannot be certain. While I imagine I should have been in Fedora, it is possible I was in a brief Windows interlude. The fact is, the issue occurred while running FMW on either Windows or Fedora. In a new way of thinking I would say that 75/80% I was using Fedora? :smiley: :smiley:
Thank you again for your insight.