On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 4:40 AM, g <geleem at bellsouth.net> wrote: > > =+=+= > $ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc > [sudo] password for geo: > > Disk /dev/sdc: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes > 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders > Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes > Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes > I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes > Disk identifier: 0x0009ede7 > > Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System > /dev/sdc1 * 1 103 819200 83 Linux > Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary. > /dev/sdc2 103 230 1024000 82 Linux swap / Solaris > Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary. > /dev/sdc3 230 2107 15073280 83 Linux > /dev/sdc4 2107 121602 959844352 5 Extended > /dev/sdc5 2108 42019 320587970+ 83 Linux > Partition 5 does not start on physical sector boundary. > =+=+= What are these units? Tracks? So 1 = 63, so the start of sdc1 is 1=63? Annoying. I wish these tools would get updated to do sectors by default, tracks are useless. You can try parted /dev/sdc u s p That should be in sectors. If the start value is divisible by 8, it is 4KiB sector aligned, *assuming* the drive does not have a jumper enabled for Windows XP compatibility. I'd like to believe those drives are long gone by now but heck we keep running into ancient versions of fdisk and parted with bad legacy behaviors. Use gparted booted from say a Fedora 23 live workstation USB stick (created with dd), and 'dnf install gparted'. There's an option to move/resize. Just give it a new start value and keep the size the same. Moving takes a long time, every sector for the chosen partition has to be copied and moved forward or backward. Or back it up, blow it away, and repartition. Any new tool should warn or flat out prevent you from improperly aligning but the simplest way to do it is to always align on 1MiB boundaries. For example partition 1 starts at LBA 2048 which is 1MiB aligned, and now make all partitions sized in MiB increments and they will all align Depending on the age of the file system, it's not a bad idea to just start over every once in a while. -- Chris Murphy