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

submitted 5 days ago by MoLoPoLY@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

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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?

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[-] muhyb@programming.dev 5 points 5 days ago

Install smartmontools package for your distro, if it's not already installed. Then

Check your disk's name with sudo lsblk. After that, replace your_disk with your disk's name (sda, nvme0n1 etc.) in the command below.

sudo smartctl -x /dev/your_disk

If the results say PASSED, you're probably good. You can also pass the output to an LLM by the way. At least they are good at these kind of things.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 days ago

I would strongly recommend not using a LLM as they are error prone

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 3 days ago

I agree though I use them as TLDR in this context and they're generally fine with that as far as I can tell. Otherwise it's a long output to check but I usually check the entire output anyway.

this post was submitted on 25 May 2026

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