I cannot format anymore the hard drive of my laptop. Here is how I proceed: I am starting my computer with a USB live drive (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - the Lucid Lynx). Then I start disk utility and try to format the hard drive - I choosed to format the Master boot record but I get the following error: Error creating partition table: helper exited with exit code 1: Error calling fsync(2) on /dev/sda: Input/output error If I try to delete partitions I get the following error Error erasing: helper exited with exit code 1: In part_del_partition: device_file=/dev/sda, offset=32256 Entering MS-DOS parser (offset=0, size=30005821440) MSDOS_MAGIC found looking at part 0 (offset 32256, size 4096157184, type 0x83) new part entry looking at part 1 (offset 10618836480, size 8414461440, type 0x83) new part entry looking at part 2 (offset 19033297920, size 1077511680, type 0x82) new part entry looking at part 3 (offset 20110809600, size 9895011840, type 0x07) new part entry Exiting MS-DOS parser MSDOS partition table detected got it got disk got partition - part-type=0 Error: Input/output error during write on /dev/sda ped_disk_commit_to_dev() failed If I try to install ubuntu frrom the usb on the hard drive and choose erase and use the entire disk I get the error message Input/output error during write on /dev/sda For side infos I have at the moment 4 partitions on my hard drive: /dev/sda1 (ext2) /dev/sda2 (ext2) /dev/sda3 (swap) /dev/sda1 (ntfs) + /dev/sda (unlocated Space) My ultimate goal is to reinstall ubuntu and have only 2 partitions... I would really appreciate any help here! Thanks JB