📚 A cautionary tale

Was trying to reformat a flash drive I had to demonstrate how to set it up as a bootable usb. Opened gparted, and started by deleting the boot partition. Hit apply, then I realised...

I have my boot drive selected

Without the bootloader partition I would not be able to load into ubuntu. I was still logged in, so I had two options - either spend hours backing up all my data and doing a fresh install, or try to repair the drive. It was risky, but I decided to use testdisk on a live USB to try and recover the lost partition. Even if it failed, I would be able to use the same tool to recover my data anyway.

And thankfully, it worked. I had a bit of trouble actually installing testdisk on the live drive (had to add 'universe' to my sources) but in the end the risk was worth it.

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This is a reminder to ALWAYS CHECK WHAT DEVICE YOU HAVE SELECTED WHEN USING GPARTED