Partitioning problem

[Bob]

I had another OS installed on the disk before I installed Ubuntu using the
12.10 live CD.  There was a small primary partition, the rest of the disk was
an extended partition.  There were two partitions at the front of the extended
space so I installed Ubuntu at the end of the extended space.  It seemed that
everything was normal until I tried to change the swap partition size.  When I
started gparted it listed all of the disk as free space.  The last time any
changes were made to the partition tables was the Ubuntu install.

As I see the problem the install changed the end of the extended partition to
an incorrect value.

During the install I used whatever partitioning program the install uses.  The
first partition defined was /home then swap then root, all at the end of the
free space.  The following is the output of fdisk.

Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xdf5ee111

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63       16064        8001    a  OS/2 Boot Manager
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda4           16065   703309823   351646879+   5  Extended
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5           16128    10265534     5124703+   7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda6        10265598    30748409    10241406    b  W95 FAT32
Partition 6 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda7       781461504   976771071    97654784   83  Linux
/dev/sda8       703324160   781449215    39062528   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9       625184768   703309823    39062528   83  Linux

The Ubuntu partitions are listed backwards.  Notice that the end of sda4 is the
same as sda9, this is wrong.

Why would any program change the end of the extended partition end unless you
were purposely changing the size of the extended partition?

I changed the end of sda4 to 976773166 which I think is correct (if not what
should it be?) and now gparted can display all the partitions on the disk and I
could change the size of the swap partition.

Still have not found a way to search Ubuntu bug reports so I don't know if this
is a known problem.

-- 
Robert Blair