[CALUG] Disk alignment and boundaries -- WAS: Fedora upgrade

[Walt Smith]

Yes, I meant the "+".  thanks.

and I suppose I picked on fdisk since as far as I know, grub
provides no user info except some kinda map.   IF grub has
knowledge about the boots chain(s), perhaps a boot_chain_print() method
could be added.

I suppose my 10 partitions on my FC6 drive was still before fdisk was "fixed" ??
Unless the one Windows install on it screwed up the fdisk display.
( by adding "+" 's).

Way way way long ago, I had surmised that having a small "normal" partition
was the way for a boot to be easy.  Of course Microsoft was perceived to
be owning the FAT technology at the time, so I didn't think it could happen
until some court ruled FAT wasn't MS's anymore.

I've seen brief mention of uEFI once or twice.. as a bios replacement ?
Would like to see more about how it might work.  Is it in "product" now ?
I mean, firmware has to start doing something at power-on no matter what
else is in the box.  I guess having a ROM linux is the rage at some places.
But how different would a uEFI be ?  Or did they just leave out leggy stuff ?
 
W.........



Celebrating over 13,000 emails in my Yahoo Inbox !


>________________________________
>From: Bryan J Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>
>To: Walt Smith <waltechmail at yahoo.com>; "calug at unknownlamer.org" <calug at unknownlamer.org>
>Sent: Monday, June 20, 2011 1:25 PM
>Subject: Disk alignment and boundaries -- WAS: Fedora upgrade
>
>Did you mean plus (+) instead of star (*)?  The latter is used for active (not 
>required with Linux, or a non-Windows MBR).
>
>The problem is that 63/255 sectors/heads is _non-aligned_.  That's why one gets 
>the plus (+) at times.  The problem is the legacy cylinder/heads/sectors (CHS) 
>geometry.
>
>Newer fdisk versions in Linux distribution releases no longer use CHS, but raw 
>sectors -- be it 512b or 4KiB.  This makes things easier to deal with, and get 
>perfect alignments.  As I mentioned, I use 1GiB myself.
>
>As far as boot chain, that has nothing to do with fdisk.  Fdisk is not even 
>related to such.  The boot chain is dynamic in GRUB, handled and generated at 
>boot-time.  And Windows has an extremely dumb boot approach to complicate 
>matters in dual-boot.
>
>uEFI could have solved it better than it did.  But so far, it's just doing what 
>ARC did prior.  You have a FAT slice where you locate boot loaders.  It is read 
>dynamically, but the rest of the boot is handled as before.
>
>I will say one thing.  At least with Linux, you can address boot issues.  With 
>NT, you're f'd if it dorks up, which has been the case with some bare metal 
>Windows systems of ours on uEFI.
>
>________________________________
>From: Walt Smith <waltechmail at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Mon, June 20, 2011 10:32:06 AM
>
>I've always been NOT happy with the little stars that show
>in fdisk displaying partition sizes. (I'm not complaining about fdisk per se..
>I think it was a good idea to display the info ).  
>
>Windows seems to want more precise
>boundaries, or used to..   Haven't tried anything lately though.
>
>But Bryans suggestion is a good one: and I would add/amplify:
>
>There should be a way to make ( create ) nice partition boundaries
>to make the "star" go away ( rather than some user calculation on
>a note pad ):  either an option in fdisk or 
>a separate tool.  (you'll notice I'm not detailing the meaning
>of "star").  I never got it down  quite perfect why other OS's
>needed some boundary and others didn't.  ...  I believe there
>was some discussion ( on another list ??)
>regarding some defect in fdisk.   I'm not sure there was a defect so much as
>it's design was to simply make the part size exactly as the user told 
>
>it to.  Although perhaps round-down was a problem if the size entered
>was "mega-something byte" rather than 123 sectors... sector boundary ???
>
>Also, fdisk allowed more than one partition to be marked "bootable".
>I don't have an explanation for that.  I'd like to see that fixed if
>theres not a reason.  Perhaps a marker for each partition part of the boot chain 
>
>??
>
>An fdisk display also does not show the boot chain.
>There have been times when I'd simply forget what the boot sequence
>was  and have to trace it again..   I mean the path thru the partitions,
>not the kernel boot vmlinuz.
>
>If the boot is straight from MBR, there could be a simple text display
>showing:
>MBR =>  /dev/hda2
>
>if the boot is chained, 
>
>MBR => /dev/hda1 =>  /dev/hda5   ( primary partition )
>
>MBR= > /dev/hda4(LBA) => /dev/hda6 
>
>( chain is on partition of LBA, where LBA is encapsulation for logical hda6,7,8 
>)
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.unknownlamer.org/pipermail/calug/attachments/20110620/3c7aa5eb/attachment.htm