Partition not end on cylinder boundary Lucid

[udosoft]

Binary package hint: debian-installer

In the installer giving 100MB for the first partition size ends up in
"Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary" warning in fdisk.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: base-files 5.0.0ubuntu15
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-19.28-server 2.6.32.10+drm33.1
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-19-server x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Apr 12 17:12:56 2010
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: debian-installer

[udosoft (udo1)]

same in rc

I tried in kvm guest

result:

Disk /dev/vda: 21.5 GB, 21474144256 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 41608 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00062cca

   Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/vda1 * 3 194 96256 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/vda2 194 7945 3906560 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/vda3 7945 37009 14648320 83 Linux
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/vda4 37009 41609 2318336 83 Linux
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

[udosoft (udo1)]

Please move to the right package, I think debian-installer should be the right one.

Thanks in advance!

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I don't consider this a bug and will not fix it. Aligning to cylinder boundaries is a performance disadvantage on modern hardware, and systems that still need it are very rare. You can use 'fdisk -c' to switch off DOS-compatible mode and avoid the warning.

If you need to use cylinder alignment, you can boot the installer with the partman/alignment=cylinder option. However, I do not recommend this simply to avoid a warning from fdisk; you should only do it if there's a real problem.

[Luis Mondesi (lemsx1)]

Please do fix this, as this affects Lucid (10.04) systems being preseeded using LVM+RAID as noted on:

Bug #591909

[Travish McGinty (travishmcginty)]

Mate, I'm moving some boxes over from hardy to lucid and I get the same error when I try to use cfdisk, as I'm not too comfortable with fdisk and use cfdisk instead.

In case the error means something different than what is reported here, its "FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 1: Partition ends in the final partial cylinder \n Press any key to exit cfdisk"

Can I get a hint as to what flag to start cfdisk so I may ignore the error?

Also, I used the "partman/alignment=cylinder" on my laptop and I can run both fdisk and cfdisk without seeing the error(s). Can someone elaborate as to what the performance disadvantage is Colin speaks of?

Dumb question perhaps, if this isn't actually a problem with the partitioning done in partman, should the bug be passed on to fdisk/cfdisk?

[Saman Behnam (sbehnam73)]

Its not about fdisk only!
Got same problem with the actual Ubuntu 10.04-3 server installer.
Installed system with mdraid+lvm+drbd.
And when trying to rescue the system from rescue shell --> no good!
Ended up with repartitioning in rescue mode and reinstalling the whole system.