[CentOS] Curious fdisk report on large disk

Wed Apr 27 01:54:32 UTC 2011
Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net>

On 04/26/2011 06:56 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> James Pearson wrote:
>
>>>> Could it be that the partition table has become corrupt (e.g.
>>>> overwritten)?
>>>
>>> But everything seems to be working perfectly;
>>> is that possible if the partition table is corrupt?
>>
>> Yes - the partition table may have been fine when the various file
>> systems were mounted - which could be why all looks OK now. However, if
>> you were to reboot, you may have problems ...
>>
>> Make sure you have backups before doing any changes to the partition
>> table.
>
> Yes, I think I backup everything important every night, with BackupPC.
>
> What is strange is that I don't recall any episode
> that might have corrupted the partition table.
> I run smartd on this machine;
> and according to "sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdb"
> everything seems fine with this drive, no errors reported.
> (I'm a bit wary of running "smartctl -t" as I'm not in the same country
> as the machine at the moment.)

It might be instructive to see what is actually in that sector.  Try:

     dd if=/dev/sdb count=1 | od -tx1z

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.