Re: Emergency - partition table gone
> Well all the rescue disks didn't help any. Gpart scanned for 4 hours
> and spit out a bunch of read errors along the way then came up with no
> partitions at all. Partition Magic was confused, same with Spin Rite.
> And so I checked it with the ibm drive fitness test and guess what? Its
> completely toast. Couldn't even get past the first sector.
> I have no idea how I managed to trigger such massive corruption but
> apparently I did somehow.
> No more ibm for me. Thats the second one I've had to send back in a
> year.
>
> GRRRR.. I should have joined that lawsuit :)
>
> Cheers,
> Leo
The only time I've seen a partition table disappear was once and it was
because there was a physical defect within the hdd. The only defense against
shoddy hardware's below average MTBF is backups. dd, tar, cpio, amanda or
whatever are your friends.
Keep your metadata (fstab and such) is a secure place on read only media such
as a CD. And when the hdd dies, use the metadata to lay down new partitons on
the replacement disk and then restore with the backups. It may take half a
day to do a full restoration (once you get the new hdd), but it's time well
spent IF you prepared correctly.
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