Linux Questions

3952 readers

3 users here now

Linux questions Rules (in addition of the Lemmy.zip rules)

stay on topic
be nice (no name calling)
do not post long blocks of text such as logs
do not delete your posts
only post questions (no information posts)

Tips for giving and receiving help

be as clear and specific
say thank you if a solution works
verify your solutions before posting them as facts.

Any rule violations will result in disciplinary actions

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip

Lost partition table, can i trust the HDD again? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 2 weeks ago by MoLoPoLY@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Probably due to a power outage, I suddenly lost access to a connected USB HDD yesterday. According to parted, I get the message “unknown partition table,” and gdisk says the GPT is corrupted. Using testdisk, I was able to copy the files to another drive and restore the partition table and mount the HDD.

Is it possible that the partition table was damaged by the power outage, or does this point to a different problem? Can I safely store data on such an HDD again, or should I replace it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Adding on to the earlier comments you can run tests against the drive with smarctl e.g.

smartctl --scan (scans and lists all drives connected to your system)

smartctl -t short /YOUR/DRIVE (short non-destructive drive test, usually takes 3 minutes or so, afterwards run smartctl -a again to view test results towards the bottom of the output)

smartctl -t long /YOUR/DRIVE (this is a long more thorough test, non-destructive, this can easily take a few hours or even days depending on the size of your drive and whatnot)

smartctl -a or smartctl -x will give you testing progress in its output.

Or another option, if you can't run smartctl for some reason, and you're just testing a regular HDD not SSD, look into running a badblocks non-destructive scan.