[mythtv-users] OT: lost partition table

[Paul Stillwell]

On Feb 27, 2013, at 3:21 PM, Saul A. Peebsen wrote:

> On Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:05:33 -0500
> John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:59 PM, Paul Stillwell
>> <bigboi at wackywombats.com> wrote:
>>> Pardon the interruption for a quick question that isn't directly
>>> about Mythtv. Last week I had a disk failure on my Mythtv system.
>>> After some investigation, it seems that the partition table is
>>> corrupted or missing for some reason (I can see the data on the
>>> disk using a hex dump tool). I plan to use dd to copy the disk to
>>> another brand new drive (of the exact same size) and then use
>>> something like 'xfs_repair' (it's an XFS partition) to try to
>>> repair the drive. Has anyone had any success at something like
>>> this? If so, what did you do? Any tips/tricks?
>>> 
>> 
>> If you know the layout you could recreate the partition (assuming it
>> is a single partition) in the same place. Use fdisk for MBR or gdisk
>> for GPT partitions.
> 
> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
> 

I used System Rescue CD which has TestDisk on it. The problem was that TestDisk could see the XFS partition, but I wasn't sure what to do after that. I ended up running 'xfs_repair' on it and that fixed the partition table. I was able to mount the disk and see my recordings. I haven't put the drive back into the system yet (I dd'ed the entire disk to another drive just to be safe before I ran 'xfs_repair'), so I'm hoping it will work.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Paul