> how do I go about setting up >the alignment of the partitions I use? If you use one large partition it's easy: you just create the partition leaving 1 meg of free space before the partition. This causes the partition to start at sector 2048, which is a number that 4096 is divisible by. Newer versions of disk utilities like gparted suggest this for you by placing a 1 in the 'Free Space Preceding' box when you go to create a new partition. If you create multiple partitions, it's a little harder since you have make sure that subsequent partitions start on sectors that can be divided evenly into 4096. I've never done this as I always set up one large partition on my storage arrays, and I use a separate drive for the OS to boot from and another separate drive for my VMs. I do this for performance reasons. All of this is explained more or less if you google.