Palimpsest warns about misalignment of extended partition

[Jon Hanna]

On a drive that requires 64-byte alignment, palimpsest complains if an extended partition is misaligned, suggesting repartitioning.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this irrelevant with an extended partition, only mattering with physical and logical partitions?

The warning certainly looks alarming. It definitely looks like I should be fixing things as a matter of urgency! Unless I'm wrong in my understanding that this is harmless, the warning should be removed in such cases.

[Garry Trethewey (garrytreth)]

+1

WARNING: The partition is misaligned by nnnn bytes. This may result in very poor performance. Repartitioning is suggested.

On a 1TB SATA disk I used gparted to set up the following

Partition
100GB NTFS
70TB Ext3
2TB swap
828GB extended

Used Disk Utility to delete all, then used Disk Utility to repartition, got

Partition nnnn
100GB NTFS 512
70TB Ext3 1024
2TB swap 2048
828GB extended 512

any ideas?

[Joost Ringoot (joost)]

I found that it is possible to resolve all non-alignment issues by resizing the problem partitions a bit with gparted, using a live-cd.
The only partition where gparted fails to do this, is the FAT16 Dell diagnostics partition. Gparted ends with a numerical error on this (Which have not noted down and the problem machine is no longer with me).

Nevertheless, I am convinced this is a bug in the Ubuntu installer system, since I have let the ubuntu installer do the automagic find space and resize partitions himself without any manual interaction.

[Joost Ringoot (joost)]

These bugs are IMHO related, if not suggesting the same root cause:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-disk-utility/+bug/742123
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/parted/+bug/742164

[Joost Ringoot (joost)]

for FAT16 resize I get this error in gparted= "Filesystem doesn't have the expected sizes for Windows to like it. Cluster size is 2k( 1k expected); number of clusters is 20017 (39957 expected); size of FATs is 79 sectors(157 expected).