Mats wrote:the problem is that gparted, in newer versions totly refuses to deal with mbr tables containing an extended partition containing more than 3 other partitions. and the installer depends on libparted, by the looks of it.
That's not true:
The actual problem is that your MBR is just not valid/ not standard conforming.
On Linux logical partitions are enumerated from 5 on so everything below i.e. 1-4 is a primary partition. So /dev/sda4 is a primary partition and /dev/sda5 e.g. is a logical one.
Now looking at your partition table:
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Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda3 53833815 156360644 51263415 5 Extended
That's your extended partition. It spans until the end of the disk. An extended partition must be contiguous and can be subdivided in as many partitions as you want (only OS limit the number of partitions they support per disk).
But next INSIDE the extended partition you have a primary partition (4 < 5 --> primary)! But an extended partition may only contain LOGICAL and NOT PRIMARY partitions.
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/dev/sda4 81931563 97980434 8024436 83 Linux
You can see by the start and end values that it's contained in the extended partition: 53833815 < 81931563 < 97980434 < 156360644
This the problem with your partition layout. You put a primary and not a logical partition within the extended partition and that's not allowed. That makes gparted choke, which is understandable. I was not even able to construct such a partition layout with either gparted or cfdisk.
You now have two options to fix your layout:
1) Move the primary/extended partition so they don't overlap anymore.
2) Possibly you can somehow convert that primary partition into a logical one, which should also fix it.
This is probably not straightforward because your first two logical partitions /dev/sda5-6 are physically located in front of the 4th primary partition /dev/sda4.