Hardware :: Aligning Partitions On "advanced Format" WD Hard Disks?
Jul 27, 2010
the recent versions of fdisk on Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04 are supposed automatically to solve these things around 4k sector aligment thing if one starts fdisk with -u and -c flags. But I'm getting confused as the heads / sectors informations always differ every time I create a partition.I have WD Green 1.5TB disk. I want 2 partitions. sdb1 with 1.3TB and sdb2 with the remaining space. Here's how it looks like. When I create the first partition (1.3TB one), I get following listin with fdisk:
Code:
# fdisk -lu /dev/sdb
Disk /dev/sdb: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
78 heads, 37 sectors/track, 1015342 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
I thought that alignment of 4096-byte sector Advanced Format hard drives was automatically taken care of via Gparted or Disk Utility until I bought a Hitachi HTS547575A9E384 (Travelstar 5K750) and saw that Disk Utility showed my partitions to be out of alignment. I then realized that my WD, which I had bought a few months ago, probably had its jumper set to emulate a 512-byte sector legacy drive (512e) and is probably not set to the AF setting.
Straight to the problem.
I've searched many sites, some of which suggest using fdisk (others the proprietary software of the hard drive's manufacturer). It is essential that one change the arguments prior to changing the partition table as there is no way back (yet, as far as I know) without having to move data to another drive and starting all over:
When I was installing Ubuntu onto my laptop, I probably did a mistake partitioning the hard drive by selecting align to: nothing, because I didn't want to have unallocated spaces between partitions. However, this resulted in partitions' misalignment as no one partition in the extended one (including the one that is extended) doesn't start on a physical sector boundary. As I already have much data on the HDD and I don't have another one that big, it is impossible for me to erase existing partitions and then copy the data back. So, is there please a way to get the partitions aligned properly without deleting them?
Here is output from fdisk -lu: Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0xd58c6e9d
After getting my components, building my computer, installing ubuntu and beginning to configure things I found out about the issues with aligning Western Digital's wd20ears 2TB hard drive. So I'm wondering what my options are. It's Maverick I've installed and when I go to the 'administration > disk utility' it reports a 1MB partition at the front, then 2TB partition for Ubuntu, then 25GB swap. Can/should I be worrying about this now? Am I too late to do anything except start over (remove old partitions and create new ones beginning in the right sector?) I read in this thread (this thread here) a post that made me hope perhaps I'm worrying about a non-issue but I don't know enough to diagnose things (or fix) myself...
I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 and previously had a separate partition with another distro on it. I decided to delete the other distro's home and swap partitions and install XP in place of it. I've been following these instructions: [URL] and [URL] I have gotten to the point where I am booting to the XP CD and want to install it, but I get the message, "Setup did not find any hard disks installed on your computer" when I should be getting to the screen that asks me to select a partition to install XP on. This is what my HDD looks like in GParted:
I want to install XP in the unallocated partition, but I have a feeling I screwed up somewhere along the way and probably don't fully understand the whole thing. Even if I try to format the unallocated partition to NTFS I can't make it a primary partition (I assume because it's within sda2). The very last thing I want to do is delete my Ubuntu partition and start from scratch, but if that's my last option let me know.
Can anyone tell me if F15 is aware of the new Advanced Format Hard disks. The new dell laptop has one of these drives in it. The reason for the question is the disk is a 250Gb but only seems to have 230ish available which does seem a lot to loose? The dell website only talks about Windows and not linux. Below is from their site:
"In an effort to support higher capacity hard drives, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) industry is moving towards Advanced Format (AF) HDDs with 4KB sectors to address the current limitations with the 512-byte sector HDDs. The transition to 4KB sector HDDs will allow storage devices to more easily adopt larger capacities in both the notebook and desktop space. While hard drives will transition to 4KB sectors and to maintain backwards compatibility, current Advanced Format 4KB HDDs, also known as 512e HDDs, will emulate 512-byte SATA communications to hosts and will operate at 4KB."
So I finally bought an advanced format drive, the 2 TB Samsung f4. I will be using it on my slackware box, running slackware 12.2 with kernel 2.6.27-7. I intend to format the drive by hand with fdisk and start the first partition on sector 2048, or perhaps boot a livecd and format it with a newer version of fdisk or parted that will natively partition this drive correctly. My real question is, do I have to do anything special to add this drive to an existing LVM volume group? I'm thinking no, since LVM basically just breaks all your data into 4 MB chunks and spreads them across the pool of partitions you've defined, but I've found many conflicting opinions from searching google. To simplify things, I'm not using RAID of any sort, neither hardware nor mdraid.
My System Intel Core Duo E5300 Mobo - Gigabyte G31M-ES2L 1GB DDR2 800MHz RAM 4 x WD20EARS HDD I have been trying to install Fedora or Ubuntu for over a week. I thought it would take an hour and i would be away. I have been trying to install using the mdadm Software RAID feature. Everytime it takes about a day to format the drives and then i get an installation error. The drives state they are ready to use as is on any operating system other then WinXP, but this does not appear to be the case.
I am very new to Fedora... I have been doing some reading.[URL].. That information has been promising. I have been able to get into Fdisk off the live CD but i can't figure out how or if it is possible to do what i want it to.
Has anyone had any luck getting these drives to function correctly in a software RAID? I have had good luck with WD drives in the past and just assumed these drives would do what i wanted to but alas i have been proven wrong.
The partitions i wanted was... - A 2GB swap parition - A 10 GB RAID 1 partition for Fedora - The remaining space as a Raid 5 for files.
Am i just banging my head against a wall here, or is this possible.
Upon trying to open a .wmv file, the system says it wants the above - which I suspect is not provided under the same name and is proprietary. Can anyone suggest the name of a plugin in the repository which would suffice? The file came as an attachment to an email file.
I have 2 WD20EARS hard drives on the way (2 TB green WD disks with 4k sectors) and I'll be installing Centos 5.5 in RAID1 on them (2 partitions, one 16 GB / at the beginning and the rest in its own partition). I read the following thread: [URL]
and it seems that I might be having problems with the 4k sectors (Advanced Drive Format in WD lingo). I'm confused as to what exactly to do. I was thinking of downloading Fedora 14 Live CD and partitioning there and then switching to Centos 5.5 to install. Will that work? Seems I want the md 0.9 metadata because it doesn't have the space limit for me (2 TB) and it's stored at the end of the partition so it avoids alignment issues. Will I be able to make that happen with Fedora 14?
I have two internal harddisk. Harddisk 1 has ubuntu, fedora installed and harddisk 2 has ubuntu installed. I normally connect either one, and use it. How can i always keep connect both harddisks, and at the start, select from which harddisk to boot? Or it's not possible?
I need some assistance in trying to format a USB hard drive to vfat format but can't seem to do so. I am currently using RHEL 5.3. I have tried the following commands and they all come back as "command not found"
Basically I got Windows 7 installed on my laptop and it's been doing nothing but slowing down more and more even though it isn't used for much more than basic internet use and I realized the hard drive was the cause, I did a bunch of stuff to try to fix it that I won't get into here, and in basic I'm to the point I'm just going to reinstall Windows 7, but this time with the help of Ubuntu's partitioning utilities.
I've already had the first ~5GB of the drive overwritten with zero's (thanks to DBAN) and now I'm booted on the Ubuntu LiveCD and trying to learn the command line stuff for formatting a drive. What I want to achieve is use the smallest amount of space possible for the MBR and that's also a point I don't quite understand. After some research on Google I read that the MBR is on one sector only the very first one, yet the first partition on a hard drive starts anywhere from 63 to 4096. Why are they so far apart? And can I force the partition to be moved closer? I know I know their is pretty much no purpose to this but it bugs me knowing that their might be 31MB (64 512byte sectors minus 1 (MBR) and 64 (beginning of partition)) just going to waste when I could put the NTFS MFT there. Then the second and last part I want to understand is I want to make the NTFS partition have a 512byte allocation unit size and have it lined with the 512sectors on the hard drive so it can have the max performance. Does anyone know how to do this stuff or could find better info than I have on the internet?
I have built a couple RAID's, but I'm uncertain of how I should format the partitions of the raid. Should I format partitions on each disk, and then add them to a raid, or should I create a raid on unformated disks and then format the raid as a partition? Does it matter, and are there performance/reliability issues? I'm creating a RAID-5 using 3 SATA disks on RHEL for user data area.
Old Commodore Vic 20/DOS/Wintel guy here who wants to make a first foray ever into Linux by building a home server with 10.04. I've found so much seemingly conflicting information that I'm lost at sea about hard drives.
I bought the Official Ubuntu Server Book, The (2nd Edition), and started reading it, learning about file system and planning a different /home partition, potential software raid, and such pre-install considerations.
The cheap hardware I had considered is: HP ProLiant ML110 G6 Intel X3440 2.53GHz 2GB Memory w/ DVD ROM & 250GB HDD 3 x SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" 6 more GB RAM for total of 8 The Samsung drives are Advanced Format. I read some reviews about OS partition alignment issues, and the past 2 days I've been down numerous rabbit holes of search on this forum and google in general about whether this will be a problem in 10.04. I'm wallowing in my own search-overload-induced fear, uncertainty, doubt, and paranoia now.
The release notes lead me to believe that "no brainer" support for these drives is now baked in to 10.04 ? That if I just follow prompts, the new install will partition and format drives properly aligned?
I am getting a new 4kb sector HDD for my laptop, WD scorpio black 750gb, I would like to image existing partitions on 512bytes sector HDD and move them to the new 4kb sector HDD, what's the best way to do this.
present config is as follows:
Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
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I am planning to keep the same three partitions as the primary partitions on the new drive and add few more logical partitions. I would have liked to move to GPT but since I need Win 7, I am stuck with MBR partiotion table.
Now, I understand how to partition an Advanced format disk, what I want to know is how to move the existing partitions on the 80 Gb disk to the new disk?
I use Clonezilla to copy partitions but it is not compatible unless both the target and the source disks are already using 4096 sector size.
I can use Acronis True Image WD Edition to clone Win 7 but how do I clone Ubuntu?
Also my Laptop's chipset is limited to SATA 1.5, will it cause any issues, I know the bandwidth is not an issue.
I have a Raid5 software partitioned using LVM (at centos 5.2 installation). Actually the raid is composed by 3 320Gb HDD. I would like to replace them with 3 2T hdd, but I'm worried about the alignment issues of the upgrade. I know it is easy to align the raid partition URL But what will happen to the LVM partition? Reformat and install everything is not an option
Reformatting two drives before re-installation. I'm new to Linux generally. Can someone give me instructions on formatting the hard drives? I have installed ubuntu on a machine that had been running Windows for a while. Since Windows worked the boot drive for years, I decided to switch the positions of the two drives; putting the old data drive into the boot position.
Apparently, ubunta was too smart for me. I guess it discovered the Windows installation, and decided that's where it should be installed too. Now, what I would like to do - and I would really like to do it this way - is reformat both the disks, wiping out everything that's on both of them; before running another installation.
BTW: the old data drive is still NTFS, and I don't want installations own both disks - reformatting and starting fresh seems nice and clean, if not entirely necessary.
*-storage description: SATA controller product: 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA AHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation
Want to add Ubuntu + Swap in the 90 or so GB range, fairly new to partitioning. Trying to create recovery disks using system tools is over 16 Gb, for that kind of expense I may as well just order recovery disks OEM if (When) Windows falls apart.
I use slackware 13.1 and I want to create a RAID level 5 with 3 disks. Should I use entire device or a partition? What the advantages and disadvantages of each case? If a use the entire device, should I create any partition on it or leave all space as free?
I have got 2 disks available and would like to create 3 main partitions: one for file system (maverick), one for home folder and one for linux swap.
I read many howtos and now I feel more confused!
I would like to obtain the more efficient solution in order of speed (performance): as far as I can understand (not so far) .. it seems that the best choice is:
Quote:
disk 1: [beginning] ubuntu | home | others [end] disk 2: [beginning] swap | others [end]
My situation now is, according to guides I read before:
Quote:
disk 1: [beginning] ubuntu | others [end] disk 2: [beginning] home | others | swap [end]
now .. before moving all my staff ..
I thought to have understood that ubuntu use swap only for hibernation / suspend activities, and therefore it's recommendable to put the system at the beginning of one disk, and the home folder at the beginning of a second disk in order to have quickly two disk reading / writing on the right position without moving too much and spend time.
But now I'm confused because it seems that ubuntu DOES use swap for normal activity (and so it's better to put it) at the beginning of a second disk.
I always saw my swap next to zero during my activities .. is ubuntu using swap like windows with pagefile.sys?
I'm trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 in a desktop computer with three disks. SDA with NTFS in SDA1, where I have Windows XP, SDB where I had Ubuntu 10.04, and SDC where I have an NTFS partition. I want to install Ubuntu 10.10 in SDB without loosing the data in SDA and SDC. When I try to install it, when I choose specify manual partition, I only find this: Where is SDB abd SDC? What do I choose in Device for Boot Loader Installation?
By fiat I must distribute my homedirs across multiple physical disks/partitions. Unfortunately this is not open to discussion so obvious solutions like a lvm home partition are not available to me. The issue: Users created with homedirs on the main home partition (the one created as home during the f13 install) behave as expected, but if I create them on a different partition (home9 for the sake of this example) the users are not able to login (dropped back to login screen), nor run x-apps if su -'d to in a konsole.
If I 'su - <user-on-home9>' in a konsole, I get delivered to the /home9/<user-on-home9> as expected, but x-apps fail with the error: 'cannot open display: :0'. This can be temporarily fixed with the command 'xhost +SI:localhost:<user-on-home9>', but I would rather fix it permanently at the source.
This appears to be an selinux problem from the following.The contexts of the the two rootdirs are the same
% ls -Zd /home /home9 drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:home_root_t:s0 /home drwxr-xr-x. root root system_u:object_r:home_root_t:s0 /home9 but when I create the users (using useradd or the gui) their respective contexts differ: % ls -Zd /home/user5 /home9/user6
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So, my questions for you selinux experts are 1) is it possible to have homedirs spread across multiple partitions with selinux, and if so, how, 2) Why, even when I manually set the dir/file contexts to match a properly functioning user5 from /home, do users from /home9 still not work (as far as login and x-apps).
I'm trying to install Fedora 13 on my HP dv6 laptop and when I try to use the Use Free Space installation type, I receive a Partitioning Error: Could not allocate requested partitions - not enough free space on disks. Before I started the install, I used the Disk Management utility in Windows 7 to shrink the volume of the C: drive down to 242 GB and leaving 210 GB Unallocated. Here is what the screen looks like when I select Create Custom Layout (also receive the not enough free space error):
I have Dell Laptop 1545 which already installed windows 7 home premium which is also having two partitions one is reserved by the oem and another is for recovery partition and another 200gb i am using for windows 7 now i have left only 80gb hard disk. So I started to install the Fedora 12 in my laptop every thing is going fine but
at the time of creating the partitions iam unable to allocate the partitions the left 80gb i tried to select and tried for custom partition but to my surprise it is giving the following message "Could not allocate requested partitions: not enough free space on disks"
I'm trying to create a user account for my children in Ubuntu 10.04
When creating their account, I have turned off the 'Connect to ethernet and wireless' option of the Advanced Settings.
However, when I log into their accounts, they still have full access to the internet through both the wireless and ethernet connections. Is this option for some other purpose?
Is there an alternate way to limit internet access for childrens' accounts in Ubuntu? (I'm used to MS Family Safety as a filter for internet access - is there an eqivalent for Ubuntu?)
I have a pretty weird problem, which is that I can't format any partitions anymore.
It started when my laptop suddenly froze and I killed it (I just ran FF, IRC client, Kopete, ... and I think the last thing I did was plugging in a USB drive). When I wanted to boot the machine again it gave me a lot of errors that the root and the home partitions are both corrupted.
Repairing the system with the DVD didn't help at all and finally I removed all the partitions to reinstall the whole system.
During the installation it can create the partitions, but it can't format them with ext4.
I tried to format the partitions with a live CD and YaST Partioner and the same problem showed up code...
