Hello all. First time poster, long time follower.

I am a setting up home server and I have installed debian jessie on my device, a acer veriton n281g which I got from a dumpster dive at work.

Any way I wanted to mount an extra HDD and I came across this when I was in the process of mounting the mount the Drive.

This is the info I have on the original HDD

root@server01:/home/jim# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 298.1 GiB, 320072933376 bytes, 625142448 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x35e715ba

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 608405503 608403456 290.1G 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 608407550 625141759 16734210 8G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 608407552 625141759 16734208 8G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.


I have tried to search up on this, but I am a bit out of my depth.

I have also removed the drive and reformatted it before reinstalling the OS.

Any help would be appreciated.

GJ

That's partition 2, not 3.

In this case it doesn't matter. Drives with a 4K physical sector size suffer a severe performance penalty for writes that are not aligned on a physical sector boundary. But, partition 2 is just the container for logical drives, and all the "action" occurs in the logical drives. The header for partition 2 is misaligned, but that is written just once when you set up the partitioning, and for that matter is only read when the system boots or you use a tool like fdisk to display the partitioning.

Partition 5, where your swap area resides, is properly aligned (starting sector number is a multiple of 8).

You're fine.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for that rknichols.


I can continue with the rest of my install now.

I am having the same trouble. But mine looks a little different that what was posted. Is this a problem and how can I fix this or should I? I've been running this system for a few months since I restored the drive from a backup, but lately I have to wait for the drive to finish what ever it is doing, guess a serious performance issue. The partition looks like my / dir.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks! Marty

Disk /dev/sda: 1.84 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: ST2000LM015-2E81
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x5725832f

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 206847 204800 100M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 538623999 538417152 256.8G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 544772094 3907028991 3362256898 1.6T 5 Extended
/dev/sda4 538624000 544770047 6146048 3G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda5 * 544772096 672770142 127998047 61G 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 672772096 673746943 974848 476M 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 673748992 3907028991 3233280000 1.5T 83 Linux

Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition table entries are not in disk order.

Whatever problems you are having are not caused by partition alignment. The only thing that is misaligned is the single sector partition header for partition 3. The only time that sector is written is when the partitioning is changed. Everything else is properly aligned.

Extensive disk activity when trying to shut down might be caused by a lot of dirty buffers that need to be flushed or by a lot of swapped-out process pages that need to be paged back in just so that the processes can terminate gracefully. You might take a look at the output from the "free" command just before shutting down.

I'll look in to other issues then, Thanks Much!

I have similar issues with my partitions, except it appears to be more extensive. I would really appreciate any advice I could get, Thanks.
root@mint:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/loop0: 1.92 GiB, 2038923264 bytes, 3982272 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 /dev/sda: 931.53 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: ST1000LM048-2E71
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc8802570

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2040 1845179 1843140 900M 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 * 1845180 211560239 209715060 100G 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 211560448 213199119 1638672 800.1M 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 213200894 1953523711 1740322818 829.9G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 299802482 477802481 178000000 84.9G 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 509520092 928950209 419430118 200G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 477802496 509517823 31715328 15.1G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda8 213200896 299186175 85985280 41G 83 Linux
/dev/sda9 299188224 299788287 600064 293M b W95 FAT32
/dev/sda10 928952320 1953523711 1024571392 488.6G 83 Linux

Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition 5 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition 6 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition table entries are not in disk order.

/dev/sda5 and 6 are /home and /data,respectively
/dev/sda3 is my /boot.

Looking at those numbers it appears that partition 1 also does not end on a sector boundary and that it does not start at sector 2048 as is normal for most systems. Sector 1 misalignment accounts for partition 2 start misalignment.

If you are only concerned about the start/end on sector boundaries then it will take some time and caution but working with a tool such as a live gparted usb all the partitions can be adjusted to align with the sector boundaries and to eliminate the unused gaps noted below.

The good thing is that with the existing gaps it should be fairly simple to realign partitions to sector boundaries. Partitions 1&2 being the exception since you would need to move partition 2 before you could align partition 1.

I see several gaps between the partitions.
There are gaps between partitions 2&3 and 3&4 in the primary partitions,

Partition 4 is the extended partition which starts at 213200894 and the sector boundary would be at 213200896. There is no real problem with partition 4 as noted in posts above although if you are realigning the partitions that would simply be one more step.

In the extended partition there are gaps between partitions 9&5, 5&7, 7&6, and 6&10.

The end result of the gaps is ~2320 4K sectors (~9.5 MB) that are unused.

1 members found this post helpful.

If t'was me I'd:
- take note of the swap UUID then delete the swap partition
- shuffle things around to suit
- put the swap partition back (doesn't matter where) and mkswap with the aforementioned UUID.
- go find something else to worry about.

All done from gparted liveCD.
Edit: - neglected to mention that gparted will align automigcally; nothing to calculate or worry about.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank-you for your observations and comments. Seeing that I have only install OSs on this this disk and still no data I will start from scratch and see if I can get the partitions aligned properly before I start installing anything.

Thank-you for your observations and comments.
I just have one more question: I read somewhere in a tutorial on fdisk that you should create and modify Windows 10 partitions from within Windows only. Is that true or is that "old" and that you can create the partitions with gparted from a Linux Mint Live USB?

The allocation can be done from Linux - I doubt it will be honoured completely by Windows which always seems to want to allocate at least one partition (boot) itself. Which version of Windows - I'm guessing not Win10 as that would require gpt disk. Post the output of this before you do anything else.

root@mint:~# lsblk -f
NAME FSTYPE LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
loop0 squashfs 0 100% /rofs
sda
├─sda1 ntfs Windoz1 267159234A190802
├─sda2 ntfs Windoz2 53EE81BC7EA41A91
├─sda3 ext4 3978e288-f36f-48fd-be46-f7e46a651ee8
├─sda4
├─sda5 ext4 /home 07a33527-c0f4-4e69-96c4-79a00b2195d9
├─sda6 ext4 /data b4519fd4-6dcd-43b0-b5a9-162f08de359e 185.8G 0% /media/mint/_data
├─sda7 swap 613195f5-31d7-415a-ae8b-3b52ba81b3cc [SWAP]
├─sda8 ext4 7989ae8d-e6cf-40ef-aad3-3fb1cbb31302
├─sda9 vfat 8F49-0B46
└─sda10 crypto_LUKS 312c4cff-6c8e-466f-b2a6-a7dcab9d537e
sdb iso9660 Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon 64-bit 2021-07-03-13-12-55-00
├─sdb1 iso9660 Linux Mint 20.2 Cinnamon 64-bit 2021-07-03-13-12-55-00 0 100% /cdrom
├─sdb2 vfat C26E-047E
└─sdb3 ext4 writable 23ed5342-b86f-42bc-8f13-f815ad5c5987 11.7G 0% /var/log

root@mint:~# ls /sys/firmware
acpi dmi memmap

This is a picture of it: