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

submitted 3 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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[-] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

It's nothing to do with faulty firmware, it's that smart will only see 1 in 3 issues and as such is simply not good enough to use as actual diagnostics.

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago

I see. So, you're saying that occasionally checking smartctl (or having smartd as a daemon continuously), running badblocks time to time and maybe checking iostat not really enough? I mean, Linux is by far the most used OS on servers and datacenters, if these are not enough someone would write a proper tool I guess, don't you think?

[-] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Not at all. It takes a huge amount of work to do so, and the benefit of using raid etc is redundancy so they can afford for things to fail. Smart mon tools is a great example, the software is great but it needs it's database to support that drives functions to work well and they can't and don't support everything.

[-] muhyb@programming.dev 1 points 18 hours ago

I see, they're solving the issue other way around then by using raid. Didn't know smartmontools work with a database, so it works kind of like an antivirus in a way. Interesting.

By the way, again it's just my experience but I want to ask this. Have you noticed faulty disks are more common in NVMe SSDs than HDDs or I happen to noticed that because it's common in cheaper options and more expensive ones are actually worth the price?

[-] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

60 40 hard disks. Tho many SSDs just die Vs Hard disks which often die a slow death.

this post was submitted on 25 May 2026

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