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alignment of partitions at a cylinder boundary

semi-OT Rick Hohensee 2 participants 2 messages Aug 21, 2001

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Quoted 1 line · Rick Hohensee

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-6.html#ss6.2

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I can get to it just fine:

[cramer:tty3]dragon:~/[7:32pm]:lynx -version

Lynx Version 2.8.3dev.18 (06 Jan 2000)
Built on linux-gnu Feb 7 2000 15:42:47

Copyrights held by the University of Kansas, CERN, and other contributors. Distributed under the GNU General Public License.
See http://lynx.browser.org/ and the online help for more information.

[cramer:tty3]dragon:~/[7:32pm]:lynx -nocolor 'http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-6.html#ss6.2'

# Large Disk HOWTO: Disk geometry, partitions and `overlap' (p4 of 6)
6.2 Cylinder boundaries

A well-known claim says that partitions should start and end at cylinder boundaries.

Since "disk geometry" is something without objective existence, different operating systems will invent different geometries for the same disk. One often sees a translated geometry like */255/63 used by one and an untranslated geometry like */16/63 used by another OS. Thus, it may be impossible to align partitions to cylinder boundaries according to each of the the various ideas about the size of a cylinder that one's systems have. Also different Linux kernels may assign different geometries to the same disk. Also, enabling or disabling the BIOS of a SCSI card may change the fake geometry of the connected SCSI disks.

Fortunately, for Linux there is no alignment requirement at all. (Except that some semi-broken installation software likes to be very sure that all is OK; thus, it may be impossible to install RedHat 7.1 on a disk with unaligned partitions because DiskDruid is unhappy.)

People report that it is easy to create nonaligned partitions in Windows NT, without any noticeable bad effects.
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