From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Arnd Bergmann Subject: Re: ATA 4 KiB sector issues. Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:46:24 +0100 Message-ID: <201003100046.24695.arnd@arndb.de> References: <4B947393.2050002@kernel.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Received: from moutng.kundenserver.de ([212.227.126.186]:62655 "EHLO moutng.kundenserver.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753625Ab0CIXqe (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Mar 2010 18:46:34 -0500 In-Reply-To: <4B947393.2050002@kernel.org> Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: Tejun Heo Cc: "linux-ide@vger.kernel.org" , lkml , Daniel Taylor , Jeff Garzik , Mark Lord , tytso@mit.edu, "H. Peter Anvin" , hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp, Andrew Morton , Alan Cox , irtiger@gmail.com, Matthew Wilcox , aschnell@suse.de, knikanth@suse.de, jdelvare@suse.de On Monday 08 March 2010 04:48:35 Tejun Heo wrote: > Unfortunately, while Windows can assume that newer releases won't > share the hard drive with older releases including Windows XP, Linux > distros can't do that. There will be many installations where a > modern Linux distros share a hard drive with older releases of > Windows. At this point, I can't see a silver bullet solution. > > Partitioners maybe should only align partitions which will be used by > Linux and default to the traditional layout for others while allowing > explicit override. I think Windows XP wouldn't have problem with > differently aligned partitions as long as it doesn't actually use them > but haven't tested it. Any idea if XP can cope with partition tables that use a 32-sector, 128-head geometry rather than the default 63-sector, 255-head one? That seems to be what some flash memory cards are using and it would make any cylinder aligned partition also 4096-byte aligned, at the cost of moving the 1024-cylinder boundary from 7.88 GiB to 2 GiB. Do we know of anything that requires 63s/255h? Arnd