On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:33 PM, Francesco Turco <fturco@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I'm trying to use fdisk (from util-linux 2.19.1) for creating a > partition on a drive. I noticed that the start sector of the first > partition must be at least 2048, that is 1 MiB from the beginning of the > drive. This can be changed by entering the "expert mode" and using the > "move beginning of data in a partition" option. But I'm still wondering > why fdisk reserves so much space by default. > > As far as I know the only sector that should not be used for partitions > is the first one, that is, sector 0. It is reserved for the MBR. So the > first partition can start at sector 1. I read that the 1 MiB thing is > Windows related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Disk_Manager. Or > it's something that Linux users should also care about? I can't find a > convincing explanation anywhere. > > This 1 MiB thing seems to affect parted, too, as it wants partition > boundaries to be multiples of 1 MiB. I don't know if it's related to the > problem I have with fdisk, though. It's a de-facto standard, which Windows does too. The first megabyte is reserved here for a boot loader or any other management data that could be needed for a disk or box to boot from. Boot loader issues are probably not that interesting on EFI boxes and other non-BIOS hardware, but on usually big sized disks it's still a safe default. Kay -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
