Partition alignment during installation

mjd95 · 2012-10-03 12:30:45

Hi,

I'm trying to install arch on a new computer. I'm following the beginner's guide here, but am stuck in the following section: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beg … rage_drive

I can partition with cfdisk as in the example fine, but when I attempt to assign the filesystem partition I get the following "error": "/dev/sda1 alignment is offset by 512 bytes"

It's an "error" inasmuch as I could proceed from here (I think), but obviously I would like to sort this out before I do that. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

graysky · 2012-10-03 12:46:46

Use fdisk or gdisk to generate partitions. The former if you want MBR and the latter if you want GPT.

DSpider · 2012-10-03 13:04:15

https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Fdev% … +512+bytes

mjd95 · 2012-10-03 13:15:54

Thanks for your suggestion graysky. I read up on using fdisk (I thought cfdisk was just a more user-friendly wrapper for it) and have partitioned using this now, it seems to have worked okay.

DSpider, believe it or not, I managed to do that before I posted here.

hunterthomson · 2012-10-04 05:36:59

Partition Alignment? Is this for an SSD? ... owe, but ya, all new 2.5" HDD's are 4K now and New, new normal HDD are 4K too, thus they require alignment aswell. ( I deployed >60 Dell computers over summer brake, and they came with a warning slip about it.)

Personaly, I just use GPT now instead of MBR. The new tool is gdisk which is part of the gptfdisk package in the extra repo. GPT paritions self-align... to I think 1MB.. hum, look that up. However, you'll have to create that special BIOS GPT partition if you want to use grub-bios. LVM2 and cryptsetup auto-allign now aswell.

Make sure you align your filesystem too.

For 512K erase block size

mkfs.ext4 -b 4096 -E stride=128,stripe-width=128 /dev/sdX#

EDIT: changed grub2-bios to grub-bios. Thank you for the correction DSpider

Last edited by hunterthomson (2012-10-04 05:45:24)

DSpider · 2012-10-04 05:42:47

hunterthomson, grub2-bios has been renamed "grub-bios" since July, according to the GRUB wiki article's history page.

Arch Linux

#1 2012-10-03 12:30:45

Partition alignment during installation

#2 2012-10-03 12:46:46

Re: Partition alignment during installation

#3 2012-10-03 13:04:15

Re: Partition alignment during installation

#4 2012-10-03 13:15:54

Re: Partition alignment during installation

#5 2012-10-04 05:36:59

Re: Partition alignment during installation

#6 2012-10-04 05:42:47

Re: Partition alignment during installation

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