[Help] HDD partitions missing or "in use" during installation.

I tried doing a funtoo installation today using the latest systemrecuecd. Then this happened.

Then I rebooted, and checked dmesg, and indeed the kernel recognized all the partitions. So did cfdisk. But this time when I tried laying down the fs, I got an error that the partition doesn't exist! Even though cfdisk lists all of them! So I did ls on /dev/sdd* and sure enough, none of the partitions were listed, even though, cfdisk/fdisk still sees them!

I then booted up a puppylinux stick, and everything was fine except that puppy is 32 bit and I need to do a 64 bit build. I blamed systermrescuecd for the screwup.

So I figured I'd just install 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 because I was just fed up and wanted to be done. To my surprise, the installer couldn't proceed because the partitions were (allegedly) in use again!

I dd'd the drive out to about 100G before all this, but could there be some crap further out on the platter that's causing this? I really don't want to dd the whole drive.

Thanks!

Heh, the irony of all this is that I'm building this box to test ZFS under linux.