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"Unwanted partitions" is a bit of a misnomer, but I couldn't think what else to call them. Here's what happened...

I had Ubuntu installed and decided to install Mint. I did so to a separate partition. Later I removed Ubuntu and cleaned things up with some help from various posts here. My boot-up (dual boot w/ Win-XP) works OK; however, there is a discrepancy in partition information:

fdisk -l reports:
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x04050404
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 3 24066 a0 IBM Thinkpad hibernation
/dev/sda2 * 4 2043 16386300 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 2044 9729 61737795 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 2044 7525 44034133+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 7526 9532 16121196 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 9533 9729 1582371 82 Linux swap / Solaris

blkid reports:
/dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" UUID="2640-14E4" TYPE="vfat"
/dev/sda2: UUID="2EACF69CACF65E31" LABEL="Main" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda5: UUID="C0480CA1480C97F4" LABEL="Secondary" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda6: UUID="a279737c-a5cc-4a21-acd0-45df230c6370" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda7: TYPE="swap" UUID="c4265a9e-1265-4cc0-bcd9-1b42c286c6e3"
/dev/sda8: UUID="a279737c-a5cc-4a21-acd0-45df230c6370" TYPE="ext3"
/dev/sda9: UUID="5bc6ded8-e2a8-4831-9d69-14e5639b4781" TYPE="swap"

/dev/sda8 and /dev/sda9 do not exist (consistent with GParted). Everything seems to be working OK, but it bothers me that blkid reports these two phantom partitions. So, how can I make them go away

from blkids manpage:

-c cachefile
Read from cachefile instead of reading from the default cache
file /etc/blkid.tab. If you want to start with a clean cache
(i.e. don’t report devices previously scanned but not necessar‐
ily available at this time), specify /dev/null.

so try 'blkid -c /dev/null' to get a new scan. I'm quite sure your old partitions just remained in the cachefile /etc/blkid.tab and that's no reason to worry.