After finally getting Puppy to run on an old desktop I was able to assemble out of a couple parts, I was trying to do an installation on a hard disk.

I have the hard disk, a nice 40Gig'er, and it is detected by GParted.
As my title states, though, I was planning to swipe the disk (I got it used), and do a install. However, I need to create a disk label, and when I try to do that, GParted refuses to do anything but give me an error.

I checked it in debug by opening in in the shell, and I found a weird set of errors:

1. "Input/Output Error during read on /dev/hda"

2. "Input/Output Error during write on /dev/hda"

Does anybody have any ideas for me?

(Note: I CANNOT run anything like Ubuntu on this machine. It'd lag like hell. I'd rather have a GParted/Puppy native solution. I'd be willing to try Damn Small Linux, though, if it takes that)

Try my favorite...

Download and burn a copy of PartedMagic and, assuming that it will boot, use it to create a disk label. You can open the GParted GUI and open "File" or right click on the partition, or something, but setting a disk label is there somewhere. You may have to delete whatever is on the HDD and begin with a blank partitioning table before you get it to work.

It seemed to be the disk, for some reason. I just replaced it with another one I have laying around, and I was able to partition!

As a last resort before junking...

If you want to try, you can see if the HDD maker has a HDD utility and run that to see if it will correct the problem. Sometimes the HDD software may malfunction, but be corrected by the utility program. Samsung has HUTIL; Seagate has SeaTools. There are others.

The utility will also tell you that the HDD is in fact junk, if that is the case.