Hi I want to partition a hard drive with NTFS and ext3.
I was going to partition the drive all with primary partitions (don't need 5+ parts) in windows XP then change the last partitions to 83/Linux with fdisk.
then mkfs.ext4
I hear windows vista and up has good modern alinement for SSD's and the like and I have new 2TB drive which might work better with 4k optimization.
Is this the best strategy or should I use linux cfdisk etc to partition.
Or I could do the best of both maybe and sfdisk -d > to-file the disk after windows, destroy the table and write it back again. That would give me windows alinement but made by linux. I want to replicate the table to an identical drive later anyway so sfdisk sounds good.
I will not boot from the disk.
Why bother? I have seen people have alignment problems mounting ext partitions in vmware under windows and want to avoid as much problems as possible vmware or other wise.
Main objectives :
Avoid Windows Miss aligning NTFS ext4 partitions. Avoid Linux Miss aligning ext4 partitions.
I would like to know if windows 7 is any better in reading any alignment you slap together in windows also.
Update: https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues#cite_ref-5 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931760
Seems to imply that XPsp3 and windows vista/7 will read almost any partition you throw at it.
And the older version of XP likes to be aligned to cylinder boundary.
I would like to partition for the older XP if this is true (even if at a performance loss on my 2TB drive) to make it compatible with as many Windows OS's as possible.
Would cfdisk then be suitable as it partitions to the cylinder boundary by default (fdisk doesn't seem too)?
Could someone verify this understanding?
Ok http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-6.html states:
Since "disk geometry" is something without objective existence, different operating systems will invent different geometries for the same disk
So in which case I would have to make the partition with XP and optionally reproduce with sfdisk -d if I was in linux.