John R Pierce wrote: > On 6/5/2014 12:07 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote: <snip> >> That doesn't really answer my question; >> I know (roughly) what the MBR, ie the first 512 bytes, contains. >> But I notice that my laptop, for example, leaves 64 sectors >> for something at the start of the disk; >> and when I get the first 2048 bytes with >> sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=sda.mbr bs=2048 count=1 >> I see that there is plenty on the disk after the first 512 bytes. >> (Admittedly Windows might have written that, as I have a Windows >> partition.) >> But does Linux ever write anything in bytest 513-1024, for example? > > traditional PC partitioning tools, dating back to MSDOS, put partitions > on 'cylinder' boundaries. this is a bad idea on modern disks, whether > they be SSD's that often have 128K physical write blocks, or newer HD's > with 4096 byte physical sectors, or raids where there's several of the > above striped together. > > the rest of the space between the sector 0 MBR and the first primary > partition is completely empty, nothing puts anything there. > > I always start my first partition at a round number SECTOR, like 128s > (which is 64k bytes assuming 512B sectors) so everything is aligned on a > power-of-two boundary.... I use parted, rather than fdisk, to do > this. something like... > > parted -a min /dev/sdb > mklabel gpt > mkpart pri 128s -1s > quit <snip> I find mkpart pri 0.0GB x.GB *always* gives me aligned partions (and parted - talk about user hostile programs! "Not aligned", with not a clue as to what it actually wants....) mark _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos