Ok brief description of system and issue, I'm on a mobile right now but will have access to the systen in question later today.

Space reserved for system specs
make: sony
model: vpcf23jfx
cpu: i7-2670qm 2.2ghz
hdd: toshiba mk5061gsy (~500gb)
gpu: nvidia gt540m

The issue is that the hdd already has 3 primary partitions. I created a (4th) extended partition using gparted allocating 15gb of unused space from the main windows 7 partition, and in that extended partition I made a swap, boot, root, usr, home, tmp, and var logical partitions. Linux wont allow 4 primary partitions on 1 hdd, and sony/micro$ already occupy 3 partitions (sda1,sda2,sda3); whats happening is when I get around to installing and configuring grub, everything goes wrong. It won't write to any partition whatsoever. When I get home I can post more information. The way the first 3 partitions are organized, it seems the mbr is doing something 'different', sda1 is a 13gb oem recovery partition, sda2 seems to be a bootloader or win7 recovery partition, sda3 is a win7 partition of like 400gb or so. Default boot partition is sda2.
What i would like to do, is get grub working on the mbr and to recognize the 2 windows recovery/boot partitions as well as my logical linux partitions--or get grub on a flashdrive so I could boot through a usb drive.
I'm installing debian squeeze using a usb live filesystem, amd64 kernel on this i7 equipped vaio. The BIOS has no options for hdd boot order or related settings, all it has for boot options is to pick which devices load first--(optical drive, external hdd, internal hdd).

Any ideas or suggestions?

Buehler?

Well if anyone else runs into this issue, my workaround (not a fix) was to reformat the extended partition and just create one big primary partition (ext4, mounted at /) and install the whole system on that one partition. This is obviously not a preferred solution as it does not allow me to add a dedicated swap partition and my /boot is on my root filesystem, also not a preferred setup. However it did allow my system to recognize /dev/sda4 as a primary partition to boot from, so my laptop is now running dual-boot Win7/Debian Squeeze.

My next task is to configure the system and drivers to work with the current hardware. So far, I've gotten my nvidia card working, and I'm tackling the synaptics touchpad now. If anyone has familiarity configuring Synaptics hardware for Xorg, I'd like to hear from you. I've noticed an error in my /var/log/kern.log that mentions the synaptics hardware:

Unable to query Synaptics hardware.
input: PS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input8

The touchpad currently works as a basic ps/2 mouse but obviously I would prefer to have the full functionality of the touchpad, (ie scrolling, 2 finger swipes, etc). I believe the synaptics drivers are already installed, locate *synaptics* brings up

/lib/modules/2.6.32-5-amd64/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics_i2c.ko
/usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/synaptics_drv.so
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
/usr/share/bug/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
/usr/share/bug/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/script
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/NEWS.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/README.Debian
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/README.alps
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/README.gz
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/TODO
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/changelog.gz
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/copyright
/usr/share/doc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/trouble-shooting.txt.gz
/usr/share/man/man4/synaptics.4.gz
/var/lib/dpkg/info/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.list
/var/lib/dpkg/info/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.md5sums

so at this point I believe its just a matter of configuring the software correctly.

Looking forward to getting some feedback on this topic!