I was having some problems writing to my home partition[hdb4] and so I backed stuff up and formatted it. I'm still having the same problems even though I've reformated it several times, shifting between ext3, XFS, and ReiserFs. Each time it tries to read from the partition and most of the commands don't work correctly because it continues trying to read the partition even after failure and umounts the other drives or something funky.

Fsck returns no errors though. Any ideas on how to fix it?

I need some help with this, so if possible please help me. Right now I am able to run correctly as root since it's not on the home partition, but The home partition still has problems. Is there a way to sure-fire clean the partition without entirely reformatting the drive?

Well it seems as if the drive had problems to begin with since my brother said that he originally could not install Windows on it. So I'm going to reformat my other HDD after backing things up and then copy the install of Gentoo to it (to save time ). I'd say thanks for the help, but nobody helped me.

You never can tell with harddrives that are moved about from time to time,
leads can get broke, soder pionts can get bent over to create unneccessary gates, and most of all, it only takes a slight jar to render some factory harddrive heads off their spots.

The drive is probably broken. If you continue to have problems with other drives,
check your cables and mothorboard.

I have found a problem that might be the reason for it doing this. Running fdisk with this kernel(the one on the hard drive) reads the drive at 33.2gb whereas the Gentoo Live CD reads it correctly at 60gb. How can I make the kernel on the hard disk re-read the partition table since sfdisk can't do it since the root drive is on it? Is there a special way to umount the root drive or something of that nature? Perhaps chroot to the Gentoo Live CD after my system has been booted from the hard disk?

If you are able to backup the entire contents of the drive I would suggest going to the Seagate site and downloading the utility disk. Then using the utility disk Zero Fill your drive and then run a disk diagnostic test. The entire drive may be 'stuffed' or just an end or a section which you can partion off with blank space and use the remainder of the drive. Although if that is the case I wouldn't recommend using the drive for your most 'precious' files, it's on it's way out.

Troubledman

That doesn't seem to be the problem because I can read the drive fine from the Gentoo Live CD and fsck.reiserfs from it returns no errors in that partition so the problem seems as if it's within the kernels on the hard disk aren't reading the partition table correctly.

are you shure you just didnt accidentally create a patition of 33 GB and what you are seeng from fdisk is the size of the partition.

Most installations allow you to create your own /boot / swap partitions man.

fschk is to check existing disk sectors/blocks.

fschk wont help much unless you have data corruption or physical drive defects, what you are experiencinc is some sort of large disk limitation errors.

try backing everything up.
fdisk'ink the disk, removing ALL partitions.
and recreate your partitions followed by a proper format.
I guarantee this will fix your disk. broken or not.

I did partition the entire disk myself, because it's not like Gentoo holds your hand. Here's the table of the partitions, and I know that it's not reading one partition.

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4111.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdb: 33.8 GB, 33820286976 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4111 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 5 40131 83 Linux
/dev/hdb2 6 1222 9775552+ 83 Linux
/dev/hdb3 1223 1284 498015 83 Linux
/dev/hdb4 1285 7297 48299422+ 83 Linux

As you can see, the entire disk is read at 33.8gb. I thought it was slightly less, but there you have it. It worked fine with my old install, but things got fux0r3d and I had to reinstall and that's when the problem started. So I figured it was just a case of the ext3 formatter not working correctly. I also used the drive for a long time for storage in Windoze without problems.

Well it seems as if the 2.6.4 kernel is the culprit. After booting with the Gentoo Live CD (which could write to the partition with no sweat) and deleting all of the kernels and modules then recompiling the culprit kernel, I am able to use the small amount of space that doesn't error it again. It was enough to install UT2004 on though, so until the 2.6.5 kernel is perfected (the latest one wouldn't even compile for me) then I'll just be leaving it with UT2004 only on it.

Sometimes the HDD is not the problem.