amenditman Posted March 14, 2012 Share Posted March 14, 2012 I have a new ssd in my laptop for school. 120GB OCZ Vertex3 Installed Windows 7 first and got it all set up. Windows 7 recognizes the ssd and is supposed to do the aligning to Erase Block Size (EBS) automatically. I don't know my Windows system admin utilities well enough to know if there is even a built in to check low level formatting. I booted PartedMagic and used fdisk -lu to view the low level formatting. Here's the output root@PartedMagic:~# fdisk -lu Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders, total 234441648 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xef948346 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 206848 234438655 117115904 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT All the how-to's about setting up ssd's say that if you use the default 255 h/ 63 s setup that your first partition has to start on the 2048 sector and that all your other partitions have to start on a sector number evenly divisible by 1024. This will result in the partitions being aligned to the EBS. The only disadvantage I've seen to using 255/63 versus the recommended 32 h/32 s is that you can't start the first partition on 1024, wasting ~1 MB of space. My first partition starts at 2048, so far so good. My second partition starts at 206848. Divide that by either 512 (the EBS) or 1024 and you get a whole number, so that is good. Looks like Windows 7 default formatting set it up just fine. Now the fun part. If I use Windows Disk Management administrative tool to shrink the Windows partition and provide space for a Linux install, will my Linux partitions be easily aligned to EBS? I think yes, but I don't know for sure. When I shrink the partition, I will need to do the math to be sure and provide the correct starting place for Linux. I will need to do the math for each new partition to start on the correct location. Should I use Windows Disk Management to create the partitions and then let the installer do the high level formatting/filesystem creation? Or should I use GParted? If I use Gparted to make the new partitions, will I set them to align to MB? Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 I read somewhere that the easiest way to get partitions aligned is to do it with Win 7 disk management as it does it automatically. Then format partitions for Linux later. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 15, 2012 Share Posted March 15, 2012 Roger (sunrat) posted this the other day. Maybe it will help. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amenditman Posted March 15, 2012 Author Share Posted March 15, 2012 Nope, all Linux only set up. That's pretty simple, not as simple as Windows has made it yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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