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?
Which filesystem are you using? Some filesystems are better at handling power failure than others, and some write a backup partition table to the disk in other locations. It could be that you were just really really unlucky, but the partition table just needs to be restored. Hard to say for sure without examining your filesystem.
I thought it was ext4, but it seems to be ext3. A standard file system check didn’t find any errors after I restored the partition table.