old /wrong starting sektor on new harddrives with 4k

[Silvan]

When creating a new partition on an empty hard drive, the starting sektor is 63, not as it should be now 2048.

# fdisk -lu /dev/sdb

Platte /dev/sdb: 2000.4 GByte, 2000398934016 Byte
255 Köpfe, 63 Sektoren/Spur, 243201 Zylinder, zusammen 3907029168 Sektoren
Einheiten = Sektoren von 1 × 512 = 512 Bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0007d0f0

   Gerät boot. Anfang Ende Blöcke Id System
/dev/sdb1 63 1953520064 976760001 83 Linux

On a hard drive formated with the installer of ubuntu 11.04 the allignment is done wright, the starting sektor is 2048, as it should be on the new 4k hard drives.

Gparted does use starting sektor 2048 as well on standard settings.

The fix should be: change the starting sektor on a new partition to 2048.

Used versions:
gnome-disk-utility:
  Installiert: 2.32.1-0ubuntu4
  Kandidat: 2.32.1-0ubuntu4
  Versionstabelle:
 *** 2.32.1-0ubuntu4 0
        500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Description: Ubuntu 11.04
Release: 11.04

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: gnome-disk-utility 2.32.1-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Jun 26 13:43:27 2011
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/palimpsest
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=de_DE:en
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-disk-utility
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

This is more like an upstream bug, you're welcome to send it to bugzilla.gnome.org

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[[e-mail] (traderbam)]

Disk Utility starts the first partition on an MBR formatted disk at sector 63. This is a problem because:

  1) There is not enough room for Grub if the OS is installed on RAID and LVM
  2) Causes partition misalignment with physical sectors for modern disks
  3) Causes partition misalignment with erase blocks on SSDs
  4) Windows now defaults to sector 2048 so Disk Utility is behind the times
  5) I cannot find any way to change this in Disk utility
  6) Disk utility is the default GUI partition editor in Ubuntu

  I would expect Disk Utility to start the first partition at logical
  sector 1024 or 2048.

I beg to differ that this has low importance. It can lead a user to not being able to reboot their system after an upgrade to 12.04 because the Grub core.img is so huge it no longer fits within 62 sectors if the system has RAID and LVM.

THIS WAS REPORTED 1 YEAR AGO and STILL PERSISTS IN UBUNTU 12.04???? Good grief.

Presumably this is an easy peasy fix so just do it, please, and release an update.