Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

[Sergey Zolotarev]

Hello,

Is it possible that fdisk could damage / kill a hard drive after using the "Fix partition order" command? It seems that that is exactly what happened to me two times already, with two different hard drives. 

First time I thought that it was my hard drive's fault as it was pretty old and cheap, So I bought a new not-so-cheap one and was quite happy with until today, when I used that evil command again!

Both of HDDs seem unrecoverable. When either is plugged BIOS gets stuck at initial screen (can't even enter setup). Using a USB adapter didn't help either... I'm not an expert in hard drives, but could it be the result of a corrupted / bad sector in the place where the partition table is stored? 		 	   		  

Re: Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

[Ruediger Meier]

On Monday 13 April 2015, Sergey Zolotarev wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Is it possible that fdisk could damage / kill a hard drive after
> using the "Fix partition order" command?

I remember there was such bug in past. Which version are you using?
$ fdisk -V

> It seems that that is 
> exactly what happened to me two times already, with two different
> hard drives.
>
> First time I thought that it was my hard drive's fault as it was
> pretty old and cheap, So I bought a new not-so-cheap one and was
> quite happy with until today, when I used that evil command again!
>
> Both of HDDs seem unrecoverable. When either is plugged BIOS gets
> stuck at initial screen (can't even enter setup). Using a USB adapter
> didn't help either... I'm not an expert in hard drives, but could it
> be the result of a corrupted / bad sector in the place where the
> partition table is stored?

First I would try to boot via rescue CD or similar. 
Then check how the partitiontable looks now (fdisk -l) and try to mout 
partitions manually. If you are missing partitions or if you just can't 
mount them then you may try to repair/recover the partition table.  

cu,
Rudi

Re: Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

[Karel Zak]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 04:11:05PM +0600, Sergey Zolotarev wrote:
> Is it possible that fdisk could damage / kill a hard drive after
> using the "Fix partition order" command? It seems that that is
> exactly what happened to me two times already, with two different
> hard drives. 

Do you really believe that write some bytes to HDD may destroy the
device? I don't think so. 

fdisks-like utils just write some data to the device, nothing else.
You can replace it by dd(1) or "echo 'something' > /dev/sda"...

    Karel

-- 
 Karel Zak  <kzak@redhat.com>
 http://karelzak.blogspot.com

Re: Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

[Peter Cordes]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 04:11:05PM +0600, Sergey Zolotarev wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Is it possible that fdisk could damage / kill a hard drive after using the "Fix partition order" command?
> [...]
> Both of HDDs seem unrecoverable.

 It's probably not the drive that's bad, it's just that your BIOS
won't boot when it's attached.  So boot without, THEN connect it via a
USB adapter.  Or via SATA.  (SATA is electrically safe to hotplug,
thanks to having the ground pins longer than any others, and Linux
handles it just as well as USB.  I never reboot to swap hard drives.
I only reboot to check that my system still boots if I've done
anything that might put that in doubt :P)

 Or set your BIOS to not even look at USB devices while booting.

> could it be the result of a corrupted / bad sector in the place where the partition table is stored?

 A badly-written BIOS could certainly have it's boot-sector detection
code get stuck in an infinite loop with unexpected inputs.  There's no
reason to believe the data read from the sector is anything other than
what fdisk wrote to it.  You can check with smartctl -a /dev/sdX once
you get it connected to a booted-up computer.

-- 
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ;  e-mail: X(peter@cor , des.ca)

"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
 Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
 my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC

Re: Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

[Dale R. Worley]

Ruediger Meier <sweet_f_a@gmx.de> writes:
> First I would try to boot via rescue CD or similar. 
> Then check how the partitiontable looks now (fdisk -l) and try to mout 
> partitions manually. If you are missing partitions or if you just can't 
> mount them then you may try to repair/recover the partition table.  

If your partition table is damaged, it's possible to scan the disk
looking for the "magic numbers" that signal the start of partitions, and
reconstruct where the partitions are using that information.  (I've done
it myself.)

Dale

RE: Fix partition order killed my hard drive (twice)

[Sergey Zolotarev]

> If you redo the steps that messed it up, does it mess it up again?
> Or, do you know what the steps were and have a copy of the messed up
> table? Without one or the other, it's probably going to be hard to
> debug.

I have a backup.log created by testdisk for the messed up version, would it be sufficient? The steps were

1. fdisk /dev/sda
2. enter expert mode
3. fix partition order
4. write partition table
5. exit

I'll try to re-create the same bug on my first hard drive (already copied everything from there).