[SOLVED] Should I repartition the SSD?

altbdoor · 2012-05-16 14:26:26

Hi everyone

I have an Asus EEE PC 701SD, which houses ArchLinux at the moment. 701SD has an 8GB SSD, in which I do not know what SSD model it is. It would be appreciated if one could enlighten me on this matter, as it seems that the Erase Block Size (EBS) is important to know of in order to partition the SSD properly.

During the installation, I have used the auto-prepare choice for my partitions. In a bid to increase its performance, I have read several wikis, including the one on SSDs.

Considering how I have used auto-prepare, there should be a slight, if not disastrous misalignment in the partitions. Therefore, I am seriously considering to repartition the SSD.

Question is, if I were to repartition, would I be able to keep the Arch inside, while repartitioning, without losing any data? Or is it inevitable that all the data in the partitions would be destroyed?

Thank you in advance.

Last edited by altbdoor (2012-05-16 17:35:47)

ANOKNUSA · 2012-05-16 15:34:33

You can use the Gparted LiveCD to move your partitions to proper alignment, instead of erasing them and creating new ones; since your SSD is so small, it should not take more than a few minutes. After doing so, however, you may need to reinstall your bootloader.

altbdoor · 2012-05-16 16:45:24

ANOKNUSA wrote:

You can use the Gparted LiveCD to move your partitions to proper alignment, instead of erasing them and creating new ones; since your SSD is so small, it should not take more than a few minutes. After doing so, however, you may need to reinstall your bootloader.

Thanks ANOKNUSA. I have considered using GParted Live CD to repartition the SSD. Downloading the .iso at the moment.

Could you please explain more on how to reinstall my bootloader? After realigning the partitions and rebooting, what should I type to reinstall the bootloader? I have GRUB as bootloader for my system.

EDIT: I have looked around the net by myself and found a comprehensive tutorial on aligning partitions on SSD in here. And also, a detailed instruction in ArchLinux forums here. I apologize for creating an already solved thread, misleaded by the term "repartitioning", rather than "aligning". Thank you all for your time.
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EDIT 2: I have realigned the partitions and everything is well. Please do note that originally, the partitions were made using auto-prepare, hence I have /boot, /swap, /root, /home partitions.

I first booted up my Xubuntu 12.04 Live CD, as it has GParted installed. Using GParted, I moved and resized the partitions, but never added or deleted any partitions.

I resized my initial /boot (/dev/sda1) from roughly 100MB to 50MB. I tried to allocate 1MB at the beginning of the partition, as directed here, but GParted seems to insist on allocating 2MB by default. A check with the sector shows that the front sectors are 4096. Since the value is divisible by 512, I went along with it.

I resized /swap (/dev/sda2) from roughly 512MB to 500MB, and then I moved it to cover the extra 50MB space that came out from /boot. With the extra space from /boot and /swap, I divided roughly to both /root (/dev/sda3) and /home (/dev/sda4).

After all was done, I checked the sectors again with GParted, confirming that the sectors are correct using the formula where 2,097,152 sectors is 1GB, and 2,048 sectors is 1MB. Then I proceeded to apply the changes to my SSD drive.

The whole process took about 15 minutes to complete. As mentioned by ANOKNUSA, there may be a chance where bootloader reinstallation is required. However, after rebooting, ArchLinux started up well, without any problems.

If by any chance, anyone needs to reinstall their bootloader for GRUB version 1.*, a detailed instruction is available here.

Hope this helps. Thank you.

Last edited by altbdoor (2012-05-17 04:09:51)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-05-16 14:26:26

[SOLVED] Should I repartition the SSD?

#2 2012-05-16 15:34:33

Re: [SOLVED] Should I repartition the SSD?

#3 2012-05-16 16:45:24

Re: [SOLVED] Should I repartition the SSD?

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