cfdisk: "Fatal error: Bad Primary partition"

[Nebu John Mathai <mathai@ecf.utoronto.ca>]

Has anone got this error?

On installing Debian 2.0 I used cfdisk to partition my 8.4Gig drive. The
first time I did it, I did not like the partition sizes (after writing the
partition info and initializing my root partition) and so rebooted the
machine (by going into the installation option to reboot the machine) to
do the install once more. However, this time, when I went to partition the
drive cfdisk stated "fatal error: ban primary partition". So I went to
fdisk and erased the partition info (fdisk seemed to work) and ran cfdisk
once more and all was fine. I installed debian and everything worked fine.

Now, a few days later I went to install NT (unfortunately I have to run
some NT software for school), and NT disabled the "bootability" of Linux.
So I used a boot disk to get back to Linux, and tried running cfdisk to
get the partition with linux (the primary partition) bootable, but cfdisk
now complains: "Fatal error: bad primary partition".

Any ideas on what this error means? Is my hard drive bad? I noticed that
cfdisk gives me cylinder/head/sector information on my drive that does not
matchmy hard drive specs ... should I use cfdisk to change that info?

Thanks for any advice!