GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 659011
partition X does not start on a track boundary
Last modified: 2011-11-28 16:23:17 UTC
Hi All, I'm working on a machine that multiboots operating systems (its fine as a single machine, but lacks the horsepower for VMs). Disk layout: Disk 1 +- Primary Partition +- 32 MB Boot (Fat 16, /sda1) +- Extended Partition (Fat 16, /sda2) +- Partition (30 GB), Windowx XP (NTFS, /sda5) +- Partition (40 GB), Windowx Vista (NTFS, /sda6) +- Partition (15 GB), Ubuntu 11 (EXT4, /sda7) +- Partition (15 GB), Fedora 15 (EXT4, /sda8) +- Partition (15 GB), Ubuntu 10 (EXT4, /sda9) +- Partition (15 GB), Fedora 14 (EXT4, /sda10) +- Partition (15 GB), Swap (Swap, /sda11) Disk 2 +- Primary Partition +- 10 GB Boot (NetBSD, /sb1) +- Primary Partition +- 10 GB Boot (FreeBSD, /sb2) +- Primary Partition +- 10 GB Boot (OpenBSD, /sb3) +- Primary Partition +- 30 GB Boot (OpenSolaris 11, /sb4) The Linux and BSD operating systems complain about sectors and partition boundaries. I'm on OpenBSD now, and the dmesg's are: GEOM: ad4: partition 2 does not start on a track boundary. GEOM: ad4: partition 2 does not end on a track boundary. GEOM: ad5: partition 3 does not start on a track boundary. GEOM: ad5: partition 3 does not end on a track boundary. GEOM: ad5: partition 2 does not start on a track boundary. GEOM: ad5: partition 2 does not end on a track boundary. GEOM: ad5: partition 1 does not start on a track boundary. GEOM: ad5: partition 1 does not end on a track boundary. I also get similar messages on two additional laptops and three other desktops (all multiboot, but not as pathological as described above). I believe all used GParted 0.9.x (one laptop is old, and might have use 0.8.x). == Problems == Something went critical on Fedora 15, and it believes its out of space. F15 has 16 GB available, is using 4 GB, but reports 8 GB/8 GB are in use. I filed a bug report on Fedora, and the geometry was immediately pointed out (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=737310). In addition OpenSolaris 11 munged part of OpenBSD's installation. == Questions == (1) what should I be doing as a GParted user? I don't recall ever being asked about what boundaries to use? (2) Is it possible to have GParted repair the installations? I believe Fedora 15 and OpenBSD are beyond repair. Is there anything I can do to properly align boundaries (as theses OSes expect)?
> (1) what should I be doing as a GParted user? I don't recall ever being asked > about what boundaries to use? It appears that you are running relatively recent operating systems. Each of these can work with partitions aligned to either Cylinders or to Mebibytes (MiB). Hence this is not the cause of the out of space problem you are experiencing. Prior to GParted version 0.6.0, all partitions were by default aligned to cylinder. With the introduction of version 0.6.0, the default is to align partitions to MiB boundaries. If you need cylinder alignment for an old operating system like DOS, then it is available in the "Align to" drop down box when creating or resizing partitions. For example see the following screenshot: http://gparted.org/screens/gparted_6_big.png To summarize, for modern operating systems (i.e., those release since 2000) the default align to MiB partition alignment scheme will work well. > (2) Is it possible to have GParted repair the installations? I believe Fedora > 15 and OpenBSD are beyond repair. Is there anything I can do to properly align > boundaries (as theses OSes expect)? If the partition is 16 GB in size, but the file system is only 8 GB in size, then it would appear that there is room to grow the file system to fill the partition. You can fix this problem using GParted. 1) Select the partition (sda8 for Fedora 15 in your case) 2) Choose the "Partition --> Check" menu option 3) Apply the operation Regarding the alignment boundaries, you do not need to do anything. Some of the tools display warnings, such as older versions of fdisk. These warning only apply for legacy operating systems such as DOS. Hence you can ignore these warnings for modern operating systems. Does the above set of steps address the problem?
Ping Jeffrey...
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!