bug#33607: Recovered from partition list loop

[Phillip Susi]

Was the kernel able to correctly read the partition table at boot or
after running blockdev --rereadpt?  If fdisk and the kernel are both
happy with it then it may just be a bug in parted.

Paul Ausbeck writes:

> When I posted the original problem I was sort of hoping to get some recovery 
> advice. However, I've now recovered the partition table and I'm now posting 
> just to further document my experience. I'm now thinking that the bug I 
> encountered is likely in the fdisk program, but I still think that 
> parted/partprobe could be improved to better handle loops in the partition 
> table.
>
> To recover, I booted the system from a USB stick. At this point the disk 
> partition table was still hosed and there were 255 associated devices, sda1 - 
> sda255 in /dev. parted would still not print the hosed partition table, but 
> bailed out as described previously. However, fdisk would print the table, but 
> somehow saw only, I can't remember exactly, maybe 45 or 54 partitions. On a 
> lark, I used fdisk to delete the extra partitions and wrote the edited table. 
> Upon reboot, the disk was whole again with the correct/expected partition 
> table in disk order. Go figure.
>
> Cheers, Paul Ausbeck