Before I posted that I was having problems with a partition on my HDD. Well, after thinking a little while I remembered that I had deleted an extended partition that housed two other partitions (hdb5 and hdb6), without deleting those two. My problem, for those that don't know, is that everytime I try to write a certain amount to the drive or make a directory using the full path (/games/new-directory-name), everything goes all screwy.

Is it possible that the new partition (hdb4), which uses the space of what used to be hdb5 and hdb6, is running into the problem because the disk label still has the hdb5 and hdb6 stained somewhere within it? If so, how do I fix the problem? Please try ideas that don't involve a total reformat, because I want to avoid that if at all possible.

Try booting with "ide=nodma" see if it is stable.

Alright, I'll try that when I get home.

EDIT: It works perfectly now. And just to think, people were telling me I would have to totally reformat the drive. Thanks a lot man.

Well, I was having the same problem a little bit even with the nodma option. However, I took the PnP BIOS option out of the kernel which I never have done with this mobo until the first time I installed kernel 2.6.4 on it, and I think that was the problem. I'll keep you updated if it does it again.

thats for plug n play bios/os's.
what you did is deleted an extended partition with logical partitions in it.

I dont see how you did that as when I try to delete an extended partition that contains logical drives it won't let me.

Don't ask me how I did it. I think it deleted those partitions as well though and the PnP BIOS was the problem. You never know how things like that can conflict, and it was the only thing I had done differently with the 2.6.4 kernel. Either way I haven't had a problem with it yet so it might be okay. I know it's not the drive though, because the kernel on the Live CD checked it fine.

fdisk -l

or fdisk -l /dev/hda or b whatever.

It gets the same results that running fdisk and then entering 'p' does. I ran fsck earlier, and it fixed a lot of crap but exited with message or error 7. Not sure what that means though. Do you have any idea?

*bump*