Corrupted Disk

Powering on a computer only to be greeted with a disk failure has a way of changing the day’s schedule and a person’s mood.

I used my work related virtual machine (VM) all afternoon. I powered down as usual. The next day I was greeted with the infamous GRUB rescue prompt.

After several hours of tinkering I was unable to recover the disk. I tried rescuing the partition table with testdisk. Adding proverbial salt to the wound is I performed daily and weekly backups after shutting down the VM. That meant the recent backups could not help me.

I waved the white flag. I restored the system from a backup that was two weeks old. That was fine but I lost some important files created within the past few days. I used photorec, part of testdisk, to recover any text files. Eventually the software found the missing files and I restored them to the VM.

I have no idea what caused the disk corruption or why my attempts to repair all failed.

Posted: July 29, 2019 Category: Usability Tagged: General

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