[ale] PSA: Pay attention to your sector alignment

James Sumners james.sumners at gmail.com
Tue Sep 23 14:09:18 EDT 2014


Actually, could start the partition on sector 64 if you really want[1]. The
important thing is that it be a multiple of 4. You might also consider
switching to gdisk[2] instead of fdisk (provided your motherboard is
capable).

[1] -- http://jrfom.com/2010/05/03/4kb-sectors/
[2] -- http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Ted W <ted-lists at xy0.org> wrote:

> When resizing a partition using fdisk, it's important to take note of the
> starting position of the original partition before creating the new
> partition. Apparently fdisk, by default, uses track-alignment starting at
> position 63 where as newer partitioning tools (e.g. parted) aligns to the
> 1MiB boundry, starting at 2048. If you wish to still use fdisk to resize a
> partition starting at 2048 you can use `fdisk -u -c /dev/sdX` to ignore
> MsDOS compatibility and default to 2048 as the starting position.
>
> I just spent 5 hours last night fearing I had somehow munged my /srv
> partition while resizing the disk because the new partition table had the
> wrong starting point thanks to fdisk. Once I shifted the start point to
> 2048, all was fine. One more lesson well learned.
>
> --
> Ted W. <ted at xy0.org>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>



-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological
personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the
corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a
condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20140923/0c7b4370/attachment.html>


More information about the Ale mailing list