System rebuilding; problems with grub and installer

[Kevin O'Gorman]

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?
-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD