Re: [gentoo-user] Errors in nonexistent partitions - FIXED

[Peter Humphrey]

On Thursday, 17 September 2020 09:34:04 -00 Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Monday, 14 September 2020 09:38:10 BST antlists wrote:
> > On 14/09/2020 08:48, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > > Just before this started, I booted Win-10 on /dev/sdb and ran its update
> > > process. I don't use it for anything at the moment, just keeping it up
> > > to
> > > date in case I ever do. I do this most weeks, but is it possible that
> > > Win-10 tampered in some way that it hasn't before? I'm seeing these
> > > errors on/dev/ sda (which does have an NTFS partition) and /dev/nvme0n1
> > > (which does not), but not on /dev/sdb.
> >
> > I know Windows has hidden partitions and things, but it shouldn't be
> > tampering with the partition table. What sector does sda1 start on? It
> > should be something like 2048. I don't play with that enough to really
> > know what's going on, but if that number is single digits then that
> > could be the problem ...
>
> Well, I bit the bullet and started again with a new GPT partition table. I
> made the partitions the same sizes as before, but this time when I ran
> mkfs.ext4 on them, I wasn't told that a file system already existed with the
> same name. Something had evidently been changed.
>
> Then followed three days of trying to get the system to boot. Even though
> the root and /boot partitions were exactly as before and I gave the same
> commands to efibootmgr and bootctl, either the BIOS couldn't find a kernel,
> or it did but then the kernel couldn't find a file system.
>
> In the end I pointed efibootmgr at the systemd directory and it then
> started. That was definitely a new arrangement.
>
> The Gentoo wiki could do with some expert revision; it doesn't explain any
> of the structure, so when its commands don't return the expected result,
> I'm left with guesswork. For example, I've only recently realised that
> bootctl is needed if you want a boot menu of kernels (not counting grub-2,
> which I would only install under duress).
>
> At the end of all this, I'm left wondering what happened to the original
> system. (Cosmic-ray strike?) I'm not convinced that Win-10 would go round
> seeding something into all those partitions that could exist but don't, on
> the disks it wasn't installed on. And why did mkfs not recognise the old
> file systems?
>
> I don't like mysteries.

Mystery solved. It was a disk failure: a 256GB NVMe drive. It was 4.5 years 
old, which doesn't seem a long life to me.

-- 
Regards,
Peter.