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Asked: 2019-04-08 04:12:48 +0800 CST

How long does gpart scan take?

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After losing the partition table of a 2TB HDD disk i run gpart to find the lost partition. Immediately after program start, it starts to scan the drive automatically. Since over 30h. So the question is, how long does this scan take? The drive is connected via SATA in System with a 2017 Celeron processor. Thanks in advance

partition-table

3 Answers

  1. So, did you wait for it? I assume it would take several days.

    I just came across this question because I am in the same situation, running gpart against a 1Tb drive. I notice gpart is completely CPU bound (running on a single core with 100% utilization) while the disk I/O is only about 5-7 Mb/sec. Doing the calculation it will take about 46h to scan my drive and I decide to not wait for it.

    Addendum: Instead I used testdisk with its quick scan to find my lost boot and EFI partitions, and then parted to re-create the partitions with the correct start/end sectors.

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  2. I just ran gpart on a 512GB SSD on a i7 laptop. It took about 40 hours (not multithreading). It found 2 partitions which I could mount readonly and copy files off it. There is however no option to restore the partitions, for that I needed testdisk. So if you have the time and all you need is salvage files, gpart will work. For a full recovery, this is not the way to go.

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  3. Back then, it takes several days.

    But I got help from a friend of mine to estimate the time.

    1. Get process id: ps aux | grep gpart -> rember the pid.
    2. sudo cd /proc/$pid -> contains list of open file handles of the process.
    3. The number pointing to the disk being scanned is the correct one. Eg. no 3.
    4. Below ../fileinfo/3 is now the current offset where gpart is located.
    5. If a delta of the values is formed over time, the working speed can be determined.
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