System rebuilding; problems with grub and installer

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 9:18 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've got my system rebuilt on new hardware, as mentioned before.  I'm
> still trying to do things with it, but there are some glitches.
>
> 1) I installed a large number of times while getting familiar with
> what would work and what would not.  The very curious thing is that
> yesterday this became impossible.  The installer does not see my drive
> as being partitoned, while fdisk sees it as having partitions 3
> through 14.  Having all that stuff placed, I am unwilling to let the
> installer attempt to repartition the drive and erase all my work.
>
> 2) As far as I can recall, I have *never* during this process been
> able to boot a logical partition.  But that is where I want linux to
> be.  As it is, I have 11.04 on partitions 3 (fully populated) and 7
> (restored from a backup of a fresh install from when I could still do
> those), and I'm stuck with running the one on 3.  update-grub finds
> partition 7, and it's listed as an option in the boot menu, but when I
> choose it I wind up with a longer delay, but what winds up running is
> the system from partition 3.
>
> Has anyone out there seen either of these phenomena before?

Solved.  Apparently, I was not careful enough in tweaking partition
boundaries with fdisk(1).  When I deleted the extended partition and
rejiggered with gparted, both problems went away.


--
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD