fdisk and debian wheezy on PC

[mad-hatter]

Hello,

I've just just installed Debian wheezy (amd64) on my PC to dual boot with Windows 7.
No problem, works fine.
I ran 'fdisk -l' and get the following results:-

fdisk.png (11.9 KiB) Viewed 1660 times

Do I need too worry about sdb1 and sdb2 warning 'does not start on physical sector boundary' ?
sdb1 is my windows partition, sdb2 is the extended partition.
If I do need to worry, can somebody suggest a cure?

Regards

Posted in off-topic as its nothing to do with the Pi.

[RaTTuS]

no need to worry

[Long_Term_Lurker]

You appear to have an advanced format drive. Most manufacturers of advanced format drives supply an "alignment tool" of some sort. Apparently gparted can do the same thing.

Before fiddling with partition alignment you should create a windows recovery disk as moving the windows boot partition with some tools stops windows booting.

If partitions are not properly aligned so that logical clusters line up with the physical 4k sectors then you will take a big performance hit especially on writes.

Another wrinkle is that in Windows 7 your SATA driver needs to be "advanced format aware" or the Microsoft Jet database won't work (which will stop windows update from working, among other things).

Google is your friend, a search for "advanced format drive" would be a good place to start.

[mad-hatter]

Hello RaTTuS and Long_Term_Lurker,

Thanks or the replies.

I down loaded the WD aligmenet tool:-
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=128
Started the program and it reports tha all my partitions are aligned,
however 'fdisk' reports as the above attachment!!!

I had built up the new drive from my smaller 'old' HD using a very old 'clonezilla' CD and expanded
and moved the partitions with an old program that probably does'nt understand the new format.

I guess I had better down load the the latest 'clonezilla' and 'gparted' and start again.
I've got a spare drive that I was going to use as backup, I can use this as the 'new' larger drive.

Regards

[FM81]

I down loaded the WD aligmenet tool:-
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=128
Started the program and it reports tha all my partitions are aligned,
however 'fdisk' reports as the above attachment!!!

And you have booted from CD?

WD Align Media Builder. This is a Windows program that can burn the Bootable CD or create a CD image as an ISO file that can be burned by a CD authoring program. The resulting WD Align CD is bootable. The CD must be booted for WD Align to operate. The Windows PC BIOS must be set up to boot from CD before booting from the internal boot drive.

I had built up the new drive from my smaller 'old' HD using a very old 'clonezilla' CD and expanded
and moved the partitions with an old program that probably does'nt understand the new format.

Yes, main-reason! That's why you have the old partition-limits on the new disk.

I guess I had better down load the the latest 'clonezilla' and 'gparted' and start again.

May be, you can get better results by going this way; but you MUST not ...

FM_81

[mad-hatter]

Hello,

Thanks to all.

The solution was to make a cd with a freshly downloaded copy of live 'gparted'.
Move sdb1 and sdb2, move them back again, then 'fdisk -l' reported all OK.

Regards