>>>>> "hpa" == H Peter Anvin <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> Because of 63-sector legacy problems a bunch of ATA vendors will >> initially ship 512/4096 drives that are not naturally aligned. >> I.e. logical sector 63 will be aligned on a 4KB hardware sector >> boundary to overcome the misaligned default partitioning. >> hpa> I was under the impression Vista didn't do this? Is there any way hpa> to force these drives into a sane mode (at the expense of a total hpa> data loss)? Modern Windows aligns the first partition on a 1 MB boundary. As far as disks go, initially the plan was to have "legacy" branded drives with 63-sector alignment. But I think that has been abandoned in favor of instant one-time formatting. I.e. you can pick your poison *once* and that formatting will be done in constant time. Any subsequent changes to blocking and alignment will require a real low-level format. That's all fine and dandy if you go down and buy a drive a Fry's and you're the first to use it. But we don't have that luxury on systems that come preinstalled with Windows. In that case we have to deal with whatever the OEM decided during manufacturing. IOW, we have to deal with all the possible configurations. -- Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
