renumbered partitions

[Peter Oliver]

The partitioning tool in the installer of a certain well-know operating
system decided to renumber the partitions on my disk.  Linux fdisk now
shows the following:

 Disk /dev/hda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
 Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
 
    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
 /dev/hda1   *         1      1275  10241406    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
 /dev/hda2          1276      1281     48195   83  Linux
 /dev/hda3          5001      9729  37985692+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
 /dev/hda4          6001      8000  16064968+  8e  Linux LVM
 /dev/hda5          5001      6000   8032437   8e  Linux LVM
 /dev/hda6          8001      9729  13888161   8e  Linux LVM

My understanding is that logical partitions are supposed to start from
number 5, whereas I now have one numbered 4.  I guess this explains the
following behaviour from parted:

 GNU Parted 1.6.3
 Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
 This program is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License.
 
 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
 PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

 Using /dev/hda
 Warning: Unable to align partition properly.  This probably means that another
 partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it didn't 
have
 the correct BIOS geometry.  It is safe to ignore,but ignoring may cause
 (fixable) problems with some boot loaders.
 Ignore/Cancel? i                                                          
 Error: Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition.                
 (parted) p                                                                
 Error: Unable to satisfy all constraints on the partition.                

Now, what I would like to do is create a partition from the free space
1281-5001.  What are my chances?

-- 
Peter Oliver