Hope I'm not OT...

[ET_]

I just bought an external Maxtor hard disk (5,400 rpm, USB 3) and decided to deep format it as ext4 with zeroed sectors (I am on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).

Unfortunately, a power outage turned the PC off in the middle of the operation; now I can see the disk in the partition table but can't access it either for reading or for formatting. I suspect the superblock was missing, tried to replace it with the copy at 32768 without success.

The hard disk is new, nothing was saved on it apart from the user manuals.

Any hints on how to recover it back to life?

[Zr40]

The format operation was interrupted. Just format it again and it should work perfectly

Usually you wouldn't have to zero out all sectors either. That's only really useful when you want to make existing data unrecoverable, like when you're giving away the disk.

[ET_]

Originally Posted by Zr40

The format operation was interrupted. Just format it again and it should work perfectly

Usually you wouldn't have to zero out all sectors either. That's only really useful when you want to make existing data unrecoverable, like when you're giving away the disk.

The problem is I can't see the disk anymore... neither from Nautilus, not from the bash window...

[paulunderwood]

Is it partitioned?

Find what /dev device it currently is, maybe by running dmesg after you plug it in -- it will be in one of the last few lines. Make sure it is not mounted by running mount (and, on its mount point, umount if necessary). Then run: mkfs-ext4 /dev/whatever. Specifying the wrong device might wipe your main disk!

[EdH]

You might be able to see it using the Disks utility. Choose the dash and type dis and it should show up. You should be able to identify it by turning it off and on and see what shows up in the list in the left pane. As mentioned before, be careful to identify the correct device. If you identify it, there are some limited tools in Disks. GParted has more power than Disks and you might try it, if you haven't. Again be sure to identify the correct device. I often use df -h with and without the device turned on to see where it is.

A last thought, if none of the other methods succeed, is, if you can identify it to something like sda, or such, you can use dd (carefully) to clone a smaller drive onto it and then go back in and repartition/format.

[Xyzzy]

As mentioned earlier, knowing the device name is the first hurdle.

Once you know that, you can view the disk with fdisk to see if it is partitioned. (Most likely your aborted format destroyed any partitioning information on your disk.)

In our case, our drive is /dev/sda so we reference it that way.

Note that sda is the disk and sda1, sda2 and sda3 are the partitions.

# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 232.9 GiB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: F9C52F4B-E96F-4511-B1A2-8D0C4682D2FC

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
/dev/sda2    1050624 454993919 453943296 216.5G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3  454993920 488396799  33402880    16G Linux swap

[ET_]

Originally Posted by paulunderwood

Is it partitioned?

Find what /dev device it currently is, maybe by running dmesg after you plug it in -- it will be in one of the last few lines. Make sure it is not mounted by running mount (and, on its mount point, umount if necessary). Then run: mkfs-ext4 /dev/whatever. Specifying the wrong device might wipe your main disk!

sudo mkfs-ext4 /dev/sdb

sudo: mkfs-ext4: command not found

[paulunderwood]

On my debian system it is : mkfs.ext4

[ET_]

I solved the first issue with gparted. Now the new drive is automatically mounted when I plug it in. Unfortunately, it looks as read-only, while gparted shows a small key near the ext4 definition. Are ext4 partitions cyphered? Is there a way to get rid of that small key ?

The actual situation is attached as image.

[Xyzzy]

Post the contents of the /etc/fstab file.

[ET_]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Post the contents of the /etc/fstab file.

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=6383d57e-c1b1-4cc2-9239-ca33274bcd5c /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=87B8-CBD8  /boot/efi       vfat    defaults        0       1
# swap was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=cfde83b0-f373-488e-ad9d-11fe38d6483b none            swap    sw              0       0

It looks like it was mounted as RO after an error... owned by root.