How do I activate my sdb5 partition and have it stay active continually.

[Constantinos Maltezos]

Oh, and it might be useful to run fsck on the partition anyway to see if there 
are bad sectors on the disk.  If so, they can be marked as bad when you start 
from scratch so the OS knows not to use them.

I wrote a reply suggesting we look at fstab and then maybe run fsck on the 
partition, but I'm not sure it went through.