Guide: How to align boot partitions without losing data

Is there a case that an aligned disk will not be recognized by the system ,meaning that the system will try to find the boot parameters in the default place not in the rearranged (after alignment) ?

 

Not that I know of. And unlikely. The alignment is not logical but physical.

The reason for aligning a partition is mostly due to performance reasons. I don't remember the specifics, but I just know this was a bigger concern on servers hosting disk intensive programs, like databases.

 

I think that everyone should first check for disk alignment, because if You are running Vista/Win 7 it doesn't mean that You have aligned disk.

 

My conclusion is that it doesn't matter that much if it is aligned to 64 KB, 128 KB, 256 KB, 512 KB, 1024 KB == 1 MB and so on, it's important just to align it.

I don't prefer neither B, neither sectors, but when I look to numbers in B and numbers in sectors I'll stick to sectors.

And I think it's easier to work with sectors then B, just because 2 sectors == 1 KB, an 1024 B == 1 KB, so 64 KB == 65536 B == 128 sectors.

 

Alignment calculator

Referenced from this thread. I thought this would complement your thread well, Tomy.

 

Sorry to post in an old thread, but this is the first I've heard of aligning partitions.

1) If my EEEPC 901 4gb XP boot SSD has no partitions (i.e. just one formatted section with nothing unallocated), is there any "aligning" to do? I'm not seeing any problems with speed, frankly, but if there is something I can do to improve performance, hey, I just might try it.

2) And then, if I don't align, what exactly are the consequences?

Thanks.

 

84CubsFan, I aligned the C: partition on my eeePC 901 with this method (the 4 gb SSD). It worked great and diskpar reports the correct offset.

I tried to align the second SSD (8 gb) in the eeePC and parted at the terminal would not let me do it. It kept reporting too many primary partitions. I cannot figure out why because there are only three primary partitions: two on the 4 gb ssd and one on the 8gb ssd.

I thought perhaps the USB drive I was booting from was causing problems because it would then be the fourth primary partition. So I booted GParted to RAM and removed the USB drive and I still got the error of too many primary partitions.

So what I finally did was resize the partition using GParted and leave 1 MiB at the front. 1 MiB = 1024 kb, so my partition should be aligned. diskpar seems to report that it is aligned, so I think I'm good:

StartingOffset = 1048576
HiddenSectors = 2048

 

84CubsFan: it's always good to align partitions

stangbat: it's only important to align 1st partition, because You set size in MBs so all other partitions will be aligned

Happy new year!

BTW: if I'm wrong please correct me

 

You are right Tomy B., but I'm trying to align a second SSD in the EeePC. The 901 model has two. I got the first one aligned fine thanks to your guide. The second one was causing me trouble, but I believe it is now aligned as I described in my previous post.

 

HiddenSectors = 2048 == Aligned!