Sorry if this has already been covered but when I did a search for "extended partition" I got more results than I bargained for.

Before installing Mandrake 9.0 I used Partition Magic 6 to shuffle my partitions so that I had a primary partition that had C: and an Extended partition that had a blank space, then a few FAT32 partitions (D: and so on). In hindsight it probably wasn't the wisest setup. Basically I shrunk D: down and pushed it "down the line" to make room for where I wanted Linux to be on the HD.

Linux installed without a hitch, it created /, a swap partition and /home all within the extended partition. Both Linux and Windows run well, however when I try to use Partition Magic it crashes saying that there are geometry errors preventing it from identifying certain drives.

My question is, is this because I have all my linux partitions within the extended partition or is this just a case of an old version of Partition magic not being able to recognize a newer Linux partition?

Has nothing to do with extended vs primary, PM 6 won't even recognize ext3 fs, let alone any other journaled fs, and that's what crashes it.

If you require a similar tool in Linux, look into "parted" and it's gui frontend "qtparted".