How to partition a Advanced Disk HDD properly using Gparted or similar

Question

I have one of these fancy hard drives that use the "revolutionary" Advanced Disk format. I partitioned my HDD for Ubuntu 11.10 from scratch and checked with Ubuntu's disk utility for errors. However, after installation of Ubuntu 11.10, I have a warning in the disk utility saying about one partition

The partition is misaligned by 1024 bytes. This may result in very poor performance. Repartitioning is suggested.

I pretty much understand the cause of the issue since there are many posts here about this error message, but how exactly do I partition my harddrive properly to avoid these kind of misalignment errors?

I got rid of the misalignment warning by booting Ubuntu from a Live CD. I reduced the preceding partition by one 1 MB and resized the misaligned one by one megabyte with the option "align to MB".

Solution 1

I found this info from Western Digital, reading through it the kernel should support the drive without any problems - I suggest you have a good read through the site and also have a read of the article on Kernel.Org.

Solution 2

Newer versions of GParted (certainly the one which comes with 11.10) have "align partition to" option, default being 1MB - agreeing with GParted's choices will result in optimal alignment.

The links in Mark Rooney's answer have a lot of useful background info on the subject.

Comments

[n3rd]

This solved the misalignment warning, however, my question is how do I partition my HDD right away using the proper sector sizes etc. such that no misalignment occurs.

[Sergey]

@R3s3t: when using GParted, the default settings give you the optimal alignment. When allowing Ubuntu installer to do the partitioning, it also does the right thing by default. So the question is - how exactly did you manage to mis-align your partitions? :) What tool did you use?

[n3rd]

I used Gparted on an Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD, that is exactly why I am asking

[n3rd]

Good point, I might have used align to cylinder. However, for all the other partitions it worked.