Hello,
I need some help on determining damage control on a server the engineers were trying to extend a file system on.

Below is the the command that was run:

/sbin/parted /dev/sdg mklabel gpt yes && /sbin/parted /dev/sdg mkpart primary xfs -a optimal 1 100%

The mistake is /dev/sdg




We totally screwed here?

also seeing this when fdisk

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdh'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.

The engineer obviously nuked the partition table, but if that's all s/he did, no data has actually been deleted or overwritten.

For quite some time, partitioning tools have defaulted to starting the first partition at sector 2048, which represents a 1 Mb offset from the start of the drive. Unless this drive was originally partitioned using an ancient tool, the creation of a GUID partition table would not have overwritten any partitions.

If you can reconstruct the original partition layout, the file systems and associated data should reappear.

Edit: I spoke too soon. I see now that the engineer also created a partition with an XFS file system. That would indeed overwrite the existing file system on the previous partition. Time to restore from backups.

Is it waiting for the reboot to kill the data? everything still seems in place

also it was xfs before

Looks like this error has been around for sometime regarding GPT not being supported.

No, it does not wait for a reboot to "apply" the changes. parted writes to the drive immediately. If the file system on /dev/sdg was mounted when this operation was performed, the partition table and at least part of the file system structure will have been cached in RAM, which is why the files are still visible. If you reboot, the cached data will be lost and the file system will be completely gone.

It's more than likely that not all the file system structures were held in RAM when parted decided to trample all over them, which means you might get some really unpredictable results if you now try to access this file system. Ideally, you should treat it as corrupt and restore everything from backups.

I guess you could try copying as much as you can from that partition to another drive and then unmount and recreate the partition and file system. However, I would be hesitant to trust anything stored on a file system that's been manhandled by parted in this manner.

The message from fdisk is not an error, just a warning telling you that it doesn't handle GPT at all. fdisk can only do MBR; for GPT use something like parted or gdisk.