I suspect you have this setup:

1 HDD, partitioned with the MBR scheme:

SDA1: A primary partition (containing your failed installation)  

SDA2: An **extended** partition, containing two volumes:  

      SDA5 (1 GB, swap)

      SDA6 (59 GB)

SDA3: not used.

SDA4: not used.

(Drives partitioned with the MBR schema can only have up to 4 primary partitions. One of those can be an extended partition which basically says 'turn the page, look at the next list for more partitions whose data does not fit in the primary part).

If this is the case you should be able to set partition 6 to active.

You do that with:
fdisk /dev/sda a 6

Note that there should only be one single active partition at the time. If sda1 is also marked active then you either have to manually remove this flag. You toggle it in the same way as you did with partition 6. From fdisk type a 1 (Active, partition number to change).

However, start with fdisk -l (fdisk, list all partitions) or with fdisk /dev/sda p (fdisk on /dev/sda, then print partition table) to verify that the partition layout is as I assumed.

Example output from the VM I just tested with: (sda1 is active in this example).

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

/dev/sda1   *        2048    16779263     8388608   83  Linux

/dev/sda2        16779264    20971519     2096128   82  Linux swap / Solaris