salvage bad partitiong

[Husse]

If you have a decent amount of memory you can do like this
Open gparted (or it's equivalent)
Delete the swap
Move sda4 so it borders sda2
When you do that gparted copies the partition to the new location and it takes rather long time but can be done (I've done it and got bored in the process) Of course in this case sda4 can not be the system partition and you better not do this in a storm
Then you create the extended ...

[Husse]

Two questions and I really read this with interest

Delete /dev/sda4 with fdisk and created a new partition with the exact cylinder size partition now visible as /dev/sda3 from fdisk

Why move the content of sda4 if you still deleted it - or did you somehow manage to keep the content?

boot from live cd and reinstalled grub.

Really - I can't repair grub from the Elyssa or Felicia live CDs or the installed versions and I need to do that once in a while....

[Husse]

Very interesting and a bit daring but it is a special case
About grub - something makes the grub not find stage 1 and/or install it in (at least) three of my computers
The remaining laptop is 3/4 dead