On 05/22/2010 11:29 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
Robert Nichols wrote:
On 05/21/2010 07:39 PM, Robert Nichols wrote:
You have another way out. By my calculation, that drive is partitioned in DOS compatibility mode, which leaves the remainder of the MBR track unused. Running fdisk in expert mode ("x" command), you can move the partition's beginning of data ("b" command) from sector 63 back to sector 56. That will give you the needed 4K alignment and a partition that is no smaller than what it was before.
Right idea, not the right procedure. You'll need to turn off DOS compatibility mode, then create the partition, and then go into expert mode and move the beginning of data from sector 1 to sector 56.
It ended up like this, but still sync'ing at about 4M/sec instead of 40.
Expert command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sdh: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 91201 cylinders
Nr AF Hd Sec Cyl Hd Sec Cyl Start Size ID 1 00 0 2 0 254 63 64 56 1465144009 fd
Is that one of those WD drives that falsely reports its physical sector size as 512 bytes? I don't know if the kernel can always do the right thing when that happens, but all the reports I've seen say that getting the start of the partition aligned properly is sufficient.
What does "hdparm -I /dev/sdh | grep 'Sector size'" show?