I had some odd partition corruption last night. I was
getting around to playing with a compaq luggable that
I picked up off craigslist while travelling a month or
two ago, so I was copying files around... more specifically
here is what I was doing when the corruption occurred:
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1. Working system was a laptop running Linux, files
were stored on an external drive (NTFS), also had
an external floppy connected to the same system.
2. Was mounting a physical floppy disk, also mounting
floppy images from the external HDD using 'disk image
mounter' (ubuntu, via pcmanfm), then copying files from
the mounted image over to the physical floppy. When done
I was unmounting the physical floppy first, then
unmounting the disk image.
3. At one point, my external NTFS storage drive started
to show up with the same name as one of my floppy images,
but the contents were unchanged. I wrote it off to an
issue with pcmanfm, which can be quirky.
4. After a reboot, I noticed that the name was still
incorrect on my external NTFS drive. Upon mounting it,
I noticed that it appeared to have for contents the
exact contents of said named 720k floppy, and that was
all (normally there's about 1TB of my files on there.)
5. When I examined the partition table, it was nonsensical
partition types of nonsensical sizes and quantities.
----------
Thankfully I have a backup of those files from just a few
days ago. Also thankfully, 'testdisk' was able to find and
restore the lost NTFS partition, and the drive appears to
be entirely repaired.
Still, I'm left to wonder what in the world happened. I
could understand if I somehow erased the files on my
NTFS drive, clumsily, and replaced them with the files
from the 720k disk image, but this was not that simple;
the partition table was completely messed up, and I was
not doing anything with partition tables at the time.
Now I'm nervous about using pcmanfm+disk image mounter
to accomplish the same kind of task I was working on
last night...
