I encountered an error while installing Ubuntu (unfortunately it happened during partitioning). What I did was, I booted into Knoppix and used qtparted to fix the problem, but I suspect that some space is missing (like less than .5GB - I would be certain if it was any more than that) My question is: Is it possible that the messed up installation caused an error that would make a portion of the drive not viewable in qtparted, or does the program recognize all space without regard for whether it's messed up or not? Qtparted shows a total size of 37.24 GB, and I thought it was closer to 38... If I could get it to recognize the (possibly) missing sectors, I could just resize one of my ext3 partitions. Any help would be most appreciated.

It´s possible that the partition table is messed up. If you have nothing needed erase the whole drive´s partition table (can be done via the Ubuntu installer).
Otherwise you can try to erase tha last partition and make a new one.

Sounds weird though

Thanks for the reply, I had to use Partition Magic to see the problem, apparently I didn't configure Ubuntu to recognize my preformatted swap space, then it tried to make another and it crashed while doing that (since it didn't really have room to do that), Qtparted just ignored the space, but Partition Magic marked it as "unallocated", so I resized the partitions, there. I reinstalled Ubuntu, and am still having some problems, but they are minor in comparison (i.e. sound coming out of only the right speaker, etc.) - which is most likely related to alsa...

Nice. Partitionmagic have saved me numerous times. On linux if everything goes wrong i tend to use cfdisk which in my opinion is a very good partition program.

Regarding alsa it also gave me a little bit of problems on Ubuntu. since I haven´t got the time to find the problem a quick solve for me was to use the Edsp (i think it´s called that, are on windows right now), if you open XMMS and go to options it will be listed in the output sections (starting with e). Try to see if this works.

Try also to open the alsamixer (in console write alsamixer), see if something is turned wrong)