Partition Table Gone

[platypus]

So i just reinstalled gentoo and didn't have to remake my partitions so I just assumed i could format my partitions and skip the fdisk writing to table part. I installed my gentoo system, then REBOOTED, and started an install of xorg which went fine. Then I started my gnome emerge, and went to work. When i came back it had ended on some wierd I/O error. I couldnt do anything, not eve use commands like ls. I typed exit into the console and got some timoeout warning for 5 minutes, then it popped up again 5 minutes later, and repeated. Said something about spawning too quickly, I really forget. Then i restarted and grub wouldnt show up and said there is a system disk error. So in goes the live cd and I can't even mount my hard drive partitions while using the live-cd. I think when I reinstalled my system skipping the table write was stupid?
here are my hopeful partitions:
/dev/hda1 ext2 boot
/dev/hda2 reiser /
/dev/hda3 swap
/dev/hda4 reiser /home

I am thinking that gpart can help me at least get me back the information i kept on my home partition. But I am just curious if my HD is corrupt or something, or if it's obvious that I just should have written the partition table, that wasnt going to get changed. Although during the install I did reformat the home directory to reiser from an ext3.

[Beholders_Eye]

I've installed Gentoo over some linux partitions, without rewriting the partition table, I don't see why it should be rewritten... It seems that you have some hardware error, probably your HD crashed, have you tried turning on S.M.A.R.T at your BIOS?

[platypus]

nope i've never tried smart. wasn't even aware of it. when i get home i'll check my bios and see if it's available. I guess it is possible that the drive crashed. I have had the drive for a year and keep it on constantly for the most part.

[platypus]

it might be good to note though that before this install i put fedora on the drive temporarily.

did a stupid thing with fsck on the reiser partition(it was mounted) and basically had to reinstall. but i just needed a working system for the night, so i had the fedora disks sitting around. they reformatted my root drive to ext3 and my boot to ext3 which worked fine.

one thing i noticed when i viewed my partition table under cfdisk on the gentoo live-cd before installing was that the partitions had mount points and filesystem types next to them. Might this have caused a problem, especially with the boot partition because i reformatted the boot partition as ext2 after fedora made it ext3 and the rest of the partitions as reiser after them being ext3. So the partition table might have been set on the wrong filesystem types which could have been a problem. I only brought this up because i had never noticed the filesystem types being listed when i ran cfdisk all the other times i have installed linux which has been over the course of five years now. Maybe i just noticed it now, i dont know.

then again, i was able to reboot after the install and get into my system enough to install xorg and half of gnome before it crashed on java.