[arch-general] fdisk vs cfdisk... And is my drive borked or what?

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

I'm new to Arch. I recently dumped a very bloated Sabayon installation
which left me enough room on my laptop for two other distros... I went with
PCLinuxOS AND Arch because both sounded like reinstalling from scratch
wasn't a twice a year thing...

Actually I tried installing PCLinuxOS on a usb drive before I dumped Sabayon.
But something went wrong in the first attempt when the installer formatted
the new PCLinuxOS root partition on /dev/sda (as it called my usb drive)
and promptly wrote the partition table to /dev/hdb (as it called my
laptop's internal drive... ARGH! Fortunately after a send attempt succeeded
in installing to usb drive succeeded some tool called "testdisk: was able
to restore my laptop's partition table. And every thing worked again...
(That was the last time I'll ever let an installer format anything.
Strictly pre-partition and pre-mkfs from now on...)

Any way I only mention it because When I got around to installing Arch on
one of the two partitions I recovered from Sabayon, I skipped the
installation step of letting cfdisk touch my partitions and simply selected
the partition I previously prepared for it with mkfs.ext3. But later as
working my way through the beginners guide in the wiki, the clear
explanation of why distro's like to use UUID instead of /dev/Xdx# sold me
on using persistent (BUT HUMAN READABLE!!!) entries like:
"/dev/disk/by-label/Arch_lap-7" & "/dev/disk/by-label/SWP_lap-12" 
Especially since there was a wealth of how-to info right there in the
wiki... But in the process I happened to do an:
fdisk /dev/sda

Which complained about a dos compatibility flag and that I should 
change the display/entry units to sectors. This showed me a small bit of unused
space above my last logical partition (/dev/sda12)...

Anyway I decided to look at it with cfdisk (which I haven't used in years
but remembered as being easier to work with than fdisk...) But all I got
from cfdisk was.

=> FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 3: Partition ends after end-of-disk
=>                                  Press any key to exit cfdisk 

Which considering the recent "testdisk" repair, frightened be a bit. But it
also frustrated me. Especially since fdisk didn't show anything like that...

Unless maybe: When "cfdisk /dev/sda" says "partition 3:" is it counting from 0?
That is, does it mean "/dev/sda4" ???

Because that's my extended partition... And a close look at the ending
cylinder/sector of /dev/sda4 is a slightly higher number than it reports
the total cylinders/sectors to be...

I've pasted both the sector and cylinder views of my part table below, Is
this anything I should be worried about??? Is there a way to fix this
without destroying everything in the extended partition??? (That's a LOT of
backing up to dvd, and I don't have room anyplace else...)

-- 
|  ~^~   ~^~
|  <?>   <?>       Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|      ^                J(tWdy)P
|    \___/         <<jtwdyp at ttlc.net>>


Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x4573c650

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    55456379    27728158+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2        55456380    68372639     6458130    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3        68372640    70332569      979965   83  Linux
/dev/sda4        70332570   234452609    82060020    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5        70332633   103538924    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       103538988   136745279    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/sda7       136745343   169951634    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/sda8       169951698   175815359     2931831   83  Linux
/dev/sda9       175815423   183622949     3903763+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10      183623013   195334334     5855661   83  Linux
/dev/sda11      195334398   232444484    18555043+  83  Linux
/dev/sda12      232444548   234436544      995998+  82  Linux swap / Solaris


Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 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: 0x4573c650

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        3452    27728158+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            3453        4256     6458130    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sda3            4257        4378      979965   83  Linux
/dev/sda4            4379       14594    82060020    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5            4379        6445    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/sda6            6446        8512    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/sda7            8513       10579    16603146   83  Linux
/dev/sda8           10580       10944     2931831   83  Linux
/dev/sda9           10945       11430     3903763+  83  Linux
/dev/sda10          11431       12159     5855661   83  Linux
/dev/sda11          12160       14469    18555043+  83  Linux
/dev/sda12          14470       14593      995998+  82  Linux swap / Solaris