[vox-tech] missing partition table and smartctl output

[Dylan Beaudette]

Hi,

I was working on my machine this morning (fixing a fan). I pulled the side 
panel off before turning the thing off, and watched in horror as one of the 
IDC power connectors brushed against some pins on the motherboard (the 
gameport header). A couple sparks flew before I was able to grab the swinging 
power cable and turn the computer off. After fixing the fan, crossing my 
fingers, and turning the machine back on-- all seemed to be well.

I don't know if it was a coincidence, but... somehow my second internal hard 
disk didn't mount at startup. Trying to mount by hand revealed that udev 
hadn't identified a valid partition table on /dev/sdb . I fired up smartctl, 
and sure enough the drive was accessible, and all SMART parameters appeared 
OK. Except a couple:

Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   060   060   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       
1233573

Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   108   100   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       
17159523

Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   023   020   000    Old_age   Always       -       
17159523

Other than the non-zero values, SMART didn't report any problems, even after a 
long, off-line test.

Wondering what was wrong with the partition table, I re-made a new table based 
on my notes: a single partition using the entire drive. I was then able to 
mount the XFS file system. I have no idea how the partition table got hosed.

I can now work with the disk just as I had before, even as much as starting a 
virtual machine from an image on this disk...

Could the hosed partition table been caused by the near catastrophic sparking, 
or indicative of possible disk failure. This disk is nearly brand new.

Any ideas?

Dylan


-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341