Kubuntu Kauses Katastrophic Kaos

Tried installing Kubuntu on the ATI system and it would remain stuck at 15%. The live CD experience was better than FC8. No Firefox, but Openoffice was there.
Tried installing it on the nForce system, and all hell broke loose. (But, this seems to be becoming a regular event).
On the nForce system, the installation proceeded till 61% and then stopped with a corrupt media error. During the installation, after the partition was selected, an error stating an incompatible file feature in a different partition was presented (this also occurred on the ATI system). But, I chose to ignore it, in any case fsck did not find any errors in the identified partition.
After the aborted installation, Opensuse which was already on the drive would not boot. Apparently, the partition problem was the cause. It was quite irritating that the status of adjoining partitions would seem to be of so much importance to Linux. The user is left with a command line to manually rectify file system errors on the other partitions. A message adds fuel to the fire : that the partition on which Opensuse is installed was found clean and has been mounted. It is beyond reasonable comprehension, then, why Opensuse would not boot to the desktop, and present the message to rectify the file system errors.
Probably because there is no GUI for fsck?
Nevertheless, raving and ranting and cursing, I took up the gauntlet. The other option was a full reinstall and I was not keen to do this, after having tweaked the interface to my preference and installing Opera. The initial idea was to just format the partition on which Kubuntu had failed.
The first command : help. This produces a list of available commands, nothing of which seemed to meet the purpose at hand.
Then I tried "man -k format". This produced a long list of commands that had the word "format" in their name or description, but since I did not know the switch to make the scrolling stop, I was left reading the bottom of the list and nothing seemed to be appropriate.
Then I tried "man -k partition", and narrowed down on fdisk. The same command that can be used in windows, but more powerful. Since this allowed deleting partition, I though removing the Kubuntu partition would be just as effective.
Navigating through the help options of fdisk, I found the switch to delete a partition and proceeded to delete it.
Then I rebooted, this time the bootloader stopped with an Error 15. All the problems first caused by Knoppix came to mind. I strongly suspected that the issue now could be that the partitions were renumbered.
Then I went back to the Kubuntu Live CD, booted, accessed Qtparted (the offender in Knoppix), and there it was. The Opensuse Partition which was hda8, was renumbered hda7, since the previous hda7 partition had been deleted. I must say this irresponsible behaviour of fdisk does not gel well with the oh- so - intelligent-and-secure-and-geeky image of Linux.
Qtparted could not be trusted with dealing with partitions, and I had to get back to fdisk to try to undo the damage. So I created a partition in the blank area that had been left, hoping that fdisk would renumber the partitions and I shall have the correct order. This time fdisk overlooked the partition numbers, and allocated hda10 for the new partition. Fuming, I looked around the fdisk options to find one that could fix the partition order, which I took to mean setting the numbers in chronological order. This would also suit me since I was presently only interested in getting the hda8 label for the Opensuse partition so that I could have a bootable system. After reordering, the desired effect was achieved.
On reboot, Grub was back with the familiar green ambience and the boot menu. But, my happiness was shortlived, since again the disk check failed in one of the other partitions. Back to the rescue mode command prompt.

I am furious at this behaviour of Linux. The tendency to allow the concern for the well being of other partitions to impact one's own functionality to such a debilitating extent needs to be curbed. The lack of a disk check GUI seems to be the sole reason for this behaviour, and it is quite evident that there is a strong need for developers to focus on this overlooked aspect.

After searching online, I have concluded that the solution to the renumbering problem is to edit the boot options when grub is loading or edit the menu.lst file which is used to display the menu everytime grub loads. I have not tried this yet.
Regarding the nosy behaviour, a suitable solution is being searched.

A few minutes later :

I have the Opensuse installation back up. The solution to the nosy problem was in editing the /etc/fstab file. As suggested by Chris a mod at Linuxquestions.org, I could've changed a single letter. But, I deleted all the lines related to the other partitions, with the intention to recreate them from within Opensuse after it was up.
Did the editing from Kubuntu live, and the reboot was smooth. Probably the sytem time was not properly set, since during the boot, Linux reported that hda8 had not been checked for many days and enforced one.