I have a drive that has primary partitions and an extended partition that contains several logical partitions. It looks something like this:
Drive
--> Primary P1 (Aligned)
--> Primary P2 (Aligned)
--> Extended P3 (Misaligned)
--> --> Logical P4 (Aligned)
--> --> Logical P5 (Aligned)
Two primary logical partitions P1, P2. One extended partition container P3. And two more logical partitions P4, P5.
Does it really matter that the extended partition container (P3) is misaligned? My gut feeling says it doesn't matter, since this partition is only a container for the actual logical partitions that actually hold data. Thus, any read/writes will be aligned since they are accessing those partitions, e.g., P4 and P5. Nothing reads or writes to P3 unless we are modifying the physical partition layout.
Is this correct?
For @LPChip:
The alignment checks were done with
parted /dev/sda
align-check opt n # where n is the partition number.
Single-disk, non-raid setup.
The OS questions are irrelevant. The question has to do with sector alignment which is OS independent. I'm not asking how to align. I'm asking if alignment matters for the extended container.