I tried running gpart on my flash drive:

# gpart /dev/sdb

*** Fatal error: dev(/dev/sdb): seek failure.


I used strace to get this:
20319 open("/dev/sdb", O_RDONLY)        = 3
20319 write(2, "\n*** Fatal error: dev(/dev/sdb): seek failure.\n", 47) = 47
20319 exit_group(1)  

It reports a seek failure without actually doing a seek.

The URL listed in the RPM doesn't actually exist any more.  Checking the src.rpm, I find the code looks like:

off64_t l64seek(int fd,off64_t offset,int whence)
{
        off64_t         ret = (off64_t)-1;

#if defined(__linux__) && defined(__i386__)
        int             iret;
        unsigned long   ohi, olo;

        ohi = (unsigned long)((offset >> 32) & 0xFFFFFFFF);
        olo = (unsigned long)(offset & 0xFFFFFFFF);
        iret = syscall(__NR__llseek,fd,ohi,olo,&ret,whence);
        if (iret == -1)
                ret = (off64_t)-1;
#endif

#if defined(__FreeBSD__) || (defined(__linux__) && defined(__alpha__))
        ret = lseek(fd,offset,whence);
#endif

        return (ret);
}

My guess is that those defines aren't matched on a 64-bit system.  The URL listed in the RPM doesn't exist any more.  Searching around, I found source code at https://github.com/baruch/gpart .  I downloaded that and compiled it and it works.  The relevant code is now:

off64_t l64seek(int fd,off64_t offset,int whence)
{
        off64_t         ret = (off64_t)-1;

        ret = lseek(fd,offset,whence);
        if (ret < 0)
                perror("seek");

        return (ret);
}

Please update to this version.  In configure.ac, it requires automake 1.14, but I changed it to 1.13 and it worked.