For the GParted partitioning options, when creating or changing a partition on a SATA hard drive, which option is best to use; (align to cylinder, or to MiB )? The newest version of GParted I used, and it did default to "align to MiB, which then created 1 MB gaps between some partitions. Is it better to have no gaps, and is this new version safe to use to move and or resize NTFS windows partitions ? Will it include the boot sector when it moves or resizes ntfs ?Thanks.

Align to Cylinder is safer sound.

It is normal under Mb aligned partitions. Even running freeBSD 'fdisk' or any other tool implementing Mb alignment will result to similar anomaly.
Yes, better.

Gparted has always been a good tool. But it is NTFS that screws files. For data storage I recommend ufs, zfs or raiserfs if you don't want to accumulate headaches in the future.

Gparted is wiser than NTFS. Whatever the new size ntfs becomes the same is recorded. BTW, resizing partitions has nothing to do with boot sector. Gparted always warns if it is about to change something in the first 512bytes of drive.

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Okay thanks, I had a 25 GB XP partition as the 2nd, with a 70 GB as first partition, then I did shrink that first one by 5 GB, then I grew the XP partition into that now unallocated space, so to 30 GB. And it all seemed to go well, the folders and files were still there, and the XP ntfs file system checked good, and with the Vista boot manager it said error when I did try to boot XP, ( ntldr missing or corrupt ) so I put a fresh copy of that file there, and it starting booting XP but hung long time on that XP screen with 2 shades of blue, so I finally did a full clean re-install.

Alignment to 1MiB is a very good thing especially when today's hard disks and particularly SSDs use internally 4kiB sector size, translating it back and forth to standard 512b sector size. By proper alignment, done now by default by tools like gparted, as well as e.g. default installers of Windows Vista or 7, the filesystems created there do not suffer the sector--cluster misalign, starting the first 4kB cluster at the 512b of the preceding physical sector (however invisible to the OS), seriously degrading performance.

With today's disk sizes, few "empty" kiBs before and between partitions are not a problem, and the potential benefit of properly aligned partitions can be huge.

It should be noted, that also 4kiB cluster size should be preferred when formatting the partition, which is fortunately the default both for major Linux filesystems, and for Windows' NTFS.

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By the way, because of a dualboot between Windows (Vista then back XP) and Linux, I use for all my data partitions exclusively NTFS (formatted and modified always from Windows), moreover all the NTFS partitions are fully Truecrypt-encrypted. From the Linux /home partition (also encrypted, but by ecryptfs) I use symlinks to the mounted /mount/truecryptX NTFS partitions where I store common application profiles shared among all the OSs (Thunderbird, Firefox etc). Works perfectly.

How about this one?

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/displ...tion-alignment
Use MiB alignment for modern operating systems. This setting aligns partitions to start and end on precise mebibyte (1,048,576 byte) boundaries. MiB alignment provides enhanced performance when used with RAID systems and with Solid State Drives, such as USB flash drives.

Bump.

On systems that need partitions aligned to a certain amount (usually SSDs and harddisks with a physical sector size of 4KB) it is indeed a good idea to align to MBs instead of cylinders. To be sure that the pertitions are aligned as I want it I personally rather use plain fdisk instead of tools like GParted.