Bought a new hard drive. Partitioned and formatted it using cylinder boundaries and ext4. Installed Leap 42.3. Then fdisk warns me…
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sdb1 63 8193149 8193087 3.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 * 8193150 69625709 61432560 29.3G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 69625710 131058269 61432560 29.3G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb4 131058270 1953520064 1822461795 869G 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 131058333 151541144 20482812 9.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 151541208 172024019 20482812 9.8G 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 172024083 909311129 737287047 351.6G 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition 2 does not start on physical sector boundary.
Partition 3 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 7 does not start on physical sector boundary.
This happens most often if you didn’t format the disk (maybe you only thought you did, did you wipe the disk and re-partition the disk?).
If a disk is partitioned using a Windows utility, the file system is offset and not aligned exactly on the partition.
AFAIK every non-Windows utility will align the file system exactly with your partition boundaries.
Depending on what you do,
This may or may not be a critical problem since your physical disk blocks are 256k or larger (in multiples of 256k), and every file system and file system overlay has to align with what exists below it or you could have major performance degradation.
There’s your problem. Cylinder boundaries are pretty much obsolete. It is usual to partition at 1M (or 2048 sector) boundaries.
Yes, there is still a geometry in terms of cylinders/track/sectors. But it is pretty much artificial. The geometry is there because older software uses it. In your case, the start of a logical cylinder isn’t even the start of a physical sector.