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?
can’t help you with your conundrum, but I’d like to point out there are so many potential issues in the chain regarding a drive in a USB enclosure that you’re unwise to treat it as an always-on connected device. any number of those things can go wrong and net you what you had, and worse.