Not sure why we're still beating this dead horse, but that's just not the case. When I formatted the drive, I formatted sdx1.
It's not a matter of opinion, nor is it a subject for voting to decide what happened. The 18TB disk is the largest disk I own, and all my other disks were close to full when I purchased the 18TB disk. To back it up, I'd need to purchase yet another disk, and I don't plan on doing that for at least another year. More precisely, when the 18TB drive is getting close to full. On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 11:52 AM Dale R. Worley <wor...@alum.mit.edu> wrote: > > From: John Abreau <abre...@gmail.com> > > > I have an 18TB external hard drive that recently suffered a loss. When I > > first set it up, I formatted it as a single partition with an xfs > > filesystem. > > From the messages, I tend to agree with Gregory Galperin that you > accidentally formatted sdx rather than sdx1, and then repeated using sdx > rather than sdx1 when you mounted it. In particular, you saw this > peculiar situation before *before* running xfs_repair: > > > /dev/sdf exists, but /dev/sdf1 does not. > > That indicates that at that point, the kernel couldn't see a partition > table. And then fdisk reports that the disk starts with an XFS > signature: > > > When I ran fdisk to examine the drive, it gave the following error: > > > > Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.39.4). > >> Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. > >> Be careful before using the write command. > > > >> The device contains 'xfs' signature and it will be removed by a write > >> command. See fdisk(8) man page and --wipe option for more details. > > Though that doesn't solve the problem. It seems like you need to verify > the size of the filesystem, shrink it if necessary, then shift it later > on the disk, then insert a GPT before the filesystem. In a perfect > world, GParted could do this but I don't know if it can. I managed to > find these with the query "use gparted to add a partition table to a > disk that doesn't have one site:superuser.com": > > > https://superuser.com/questions/1633123/how-to-partition-a-drive-that-has-no-partition-table-without-formatting > > https://superuser.com/questions/1200128/how-to-create-a-partition-table-on-a-drive-with-a-file-system-occupying-the-whol > > https://superuser.com/questions/1650509/add-gpt-to-disk-that-has-bare-ext4-file-system-without-data-loss > > In principal, it can be done by: (1) using the right utility to shrink > the filesystem enough to leave space for the GPT, (2) copying the > filesystem "further" into the disk by that amount (which mostly has to > be done *in reverse* to not lose data, so it can't be done directly by > dd), (3) creating the GPT, (4) inserting a partition entry that > describes the existing filesystem. > > If you can back up the disk to somewhere, wiping the disk and rebuilding > it is going to be easier and safer. > > Dale > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@driftwood.blu.org > https://driftwood.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix Email: abre...@gmail.com / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 PGP-Key-Fingerprint A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@driftwood.blu.org https://driftwood.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
