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Need help restoring drives - ran sgdisk -e and now my data is gone
Posted: 11 Apr 2026, 20:16
by musicelect
I had three drives which reported "The backup GPT table is not on the end of the device."
Recommendations were to run sgdisk -e /dev/sdx
I ran sgdisk -e on all three drives and now they show no data. I know the data is still there.
Is there a way to reverse what I did? I see lots of things suggested online, but I don't know what I'm doing.
I ran TestDisk and it finds a bunch of partitions, but my drives are 8TB, 24TB, and 26TB. The log file hit 449GB before filling up my system drive and stalling the os.
Has anyone encountered this or have knowledge around this that can help restore my partitions?
Thanks!
Re: Need help restoring drives - ran sgdisk -e and now my data is gone
Posted: 12 Apr 2026, 09:11
by recuperation
musicelect wrote: Yesterday, 20:16
I had three drives which reported "The backup GPT table is not on the end of the device."
Recommendations were to run sgdisk -e /dev/sdx
I ran sgdisk -e on all three drives and now they show no data. I know the data is still there.
Is there a way to reverse what I did? I see lots of things suggested online, but I don't know what I'm doing.
Please deliver a proper case description. How did your storage environment looked like before some incident happened? Disks? Partitions? File systems? Use of RAID or similar stuff?
Read the sgdisk manual to see what the parameter -e is for: Google "man sgdisk" then key [CTRL][F] and search for "-e". Why did you ran this command at all?
"I know the data is still there" is not a substitute for a proper case description.
As for the really useless sentence "I know the data is still there": You don't know. You guess. If you overwrite just the MFT in a NTFS file system the data still there, every byte. If it is defragmented your data degraded to a puzzle that a recovery software may only solve in little parts.
I ran TestDisk and it finds a bunch of partitions, but my drives are 8TB, 24TB, and 26TB. The log file hit 449GB before filling up my system drive and stalling the os.
Rerun TestDisk for each of your disks and interrupt TestDisk once the log file exceeds 10 kByte or copy the first 10 kByte into a new file if you have a longer text file. If a text editor has problems with the length of your log file use a hex editor to copy the first 10 kByte.
Has anyone encountered this or have knowledge around this that can help restore my partitions?
Please provide a smartmontools log file for each of your affected disks:
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