Ubuntu 12.04 won't install due to odd partitioning

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 02:21:28PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I don't think so.  The last (1024-byte) block in sda7 is 8195072:
> 
>     root at redact:~# dd if=/dev/sda7 skip=8195071 of=/dev/null bs=1024
>     1+0 records in
>     1+0 records out
>     1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 9.192e-05 s, 11.1 MB/s
>     root at redact:~# 
> 
> dumpe2fs says that there are 2048768 blocks in the filesystem.  I
> presume that those are 4k blocks so that is the same as 8195072 1k
> blocks.  Thus (not surprisingly) the filesystem is occupying the whole
> partition.
> 
> This fantasy of cylinders is past being funny.  For example, using
> 255*63 guarantees that the second partition will not be aligned on a
> 1024-byte boundary.  Very inconvenient for new disk drives that only
> fake having 512-byte sectors.
> 
> The GCD of the last two partitions' sector counts 4 so they don't seem
> to have been allocated on the basis of some identical notional
> cylinder size.  But I don't know if that is meaningful -- perhaps some
> overhead sectors are not counted.

No modern OS uses cylinder allignment.  Every OS these days uses 1MB
allignment, cylinders be damned.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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