Here's what the problem is.

About a day or so ago I used Gparted live cd to create 3 NTFS primary partitions on my external 500 gig Goflex and one extended with 2 logical partitiones.

I had planned to install windows 8 on the first partition, then ubuntu and kubuntu on the other 2.

After I finished partitioning my drive with gparted, I booted into windows vista to make my bootable windows 8 usb to install it with, I also decided to check to make sure all my partitions were working properly.

Then I found they were, and they weren't.

My 50 gig first partition I had planned to install windows on showed up normal and the 300 gigs of space left in the extended partition did as well, the rest showed up as raw.

So I figured alright, something went awal while making the partitions, so I booted up gparted once again.

Then to my surprise gparted showed the entire drive as unallocated, and when I refreshed the list, it showed as all the partitions I had made earlier, buy with a exclamation mark by them all.

So I figured ok, might be a problem with the partition table as I'd seen a similar problem in past on a drive that was not partitioned at all, so I decided to create a new partition table and take the time out again to sit and wait.

Then I got a message saying gparted could not create the partition table, followed by it showing the entire drive as formatted into ntfs.

After that I figured ok I'll take a break, come back in a hour, maybe it's something I did.

So a hour later I came back after having booted up windows, plugged the drive in to see if by some miracle windows could access the drive.

In disk management when I plugged the drive in, it would freeze attempting to read the drive, as I'd seen in the past with raw disks, yet when I unplugged it I got a glimpse of disk management showing it as a perfectly fine ntfs file system on the drive followed by a "you must format disk K in order to use it".

So I then was assured the disk was raw as that is what had happened in the past, followed by a new partition table through gparted to fix the problem and a 10 hour format in windows.

So I once again booted up gparted, to get the message "error fsyncing/closing/dev/sdg:input/output error" followed by "error opening dev/sdg No such file in directory" after I refreshed and somehow saw the disk show up as perfectly fine ntfs and then tried to create a new partition table to try to wipe out all my problems and start over again.

And not gparted only shows the drive there about 1/10 refreshes the rest I get the directory error.

If anybody can assist me in any way shape or form I will be thankful.