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
