Yes, I had some unallocated space that I turned into swap partitions because I got the idea the unallocated space might be causing the problem. Then I installed Ubuntu 9.04 in one of these as a simple way of restoring grub after somehow losing it.
For now, here is the output of fdisk -l within Ubuntu 10.4. Next time I boot the Live version, I'll run these again and post - but I imagine the results will be the same.
Code: Select all
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e7729
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 1024 8225248+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 1158 19458 146988413+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda3 1025 1157 1068322+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda5 1159 6829 45552307+ b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 8999 9727 5855661 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 9728 18795 72838678+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 18796 19458 5318656 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 7484 8134 5229126 83 Linux
/dev/sda10 8135 8578 3566398+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda11 6830 7483 5253223+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda12 8922 8998 618471 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda13 8579 8921 2755116 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order
For the record, this is what's in the anonymous partitions:
sda1 XP
sda5 Windows data partition
sda9 Salix (not working)
sda13 Ubuntu 9.04
sda6 OpenSuse 11.4 (not working)
sda7 Linux data partition
sda8 Ubuntu 10.4
I think sda10 is Salix's /home - which it now can't find. I set up sda7 as /home of both Ubuntu 10.4 and OpenSUSE, but this doesn't really work as it seems to include user settings as well as data. However both OSs were working until my experiments with the Salix installer!
To recap, until I reinstalled grub from Ubuntu 9.04, Gparted in Salix was not recognising my new partitions; after I turned off swap and unmounted all partitions from the command line, it cycled through the ones it did recognise trying to mount them and saying it couldn't because I wasn't root (I think that's what it said). Grub legacy fixed that and recognised all my OSs (though it thinks Salix is Slackware), but the problem with the installer remained.