1 Topic by Zoomclub

  • Zoomclub
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Topic: Help needed please for Gparted Virgin! - With Partion Alignment in XP

Ok, I'm a newbie to SSD's - so, having to manually align partitions (and find TRIM utilities to take care of the "garbage disposal" is all new to me) - Hence the answers I've found on the net so far have been to "over my head" for my last remaining neuron to cope with! sad

What I really would appreciate is a dummies walk through of using GParted Live - I've got the latest version - to just align the partitions on both disks - as detailed below. I came here after reading a positive post on 1 of the OCZ forums saying that GP could be used without first having to delete the volume you want to align (unlike using Diskpar or Diskpart.) Think I've read too many posts on other forums 'cos now I am totally confused as to what exactly the starting offset etc should actually be

The machine is an Asus Eee PC 901/XP (Home Ed) - which belongs to a friend of mine. (Sorry, she's totally comp illiterate and won't even entertain the idea of ditching Windoze for Linux etc!)  These netbooks have 1 x 4GB Phison SSD and 1 x 8GB Phison SSD - Original - factory setup and the only option available with the "Recovery DVD" is WinXP Home inst' on the 4GB = Useless, as when once the OS is on and million windows updates plus some of the Asus utilities it's then pretty much full!

So.....I've installed XP Pro SP3 onto the 8GB and got it to boot from this - only problem is it's not just slow - doing anything in Windows I mean, but basically unusable in that even opening My Computer with no other progs running takes a good 30 -45 secs  - and actually running any progs just cripples it.

Having checked in Tsk Mgr that the CPU was doing sod all, and there was plenty of RAM available (I've upgraded it to 2GB = max the mobo will take), I can only guess that - now I've done some reading on these Solid State drives - the (main?) cause of the non existent performance is that fact that I (in my ignorance) failed to align the partitions before installing the OS.

The support forums for the "Eee Family" have been down for weeks - so haven't been able to ask the people who've doubtlessly done all this on this machine!

Thanks

Jon

2 Reply by class413

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Re: Help needed please for Gparted Virgin! - With Partion Alignment in XP

The older "standard" alignment since 30 years was "to the cylinder boundary". This worked well with the 512-byte sector hard drives.
Lately, the drive manufacturers go for the 4096 byte/sector format. This works better with the alignment to some 4kiB boundary.
Especially for SSD drives, the block size is sometimes much larger, up to 512kiB.
So, the mswindows vista and 7 editions as well as Ubuntu default to the MiB alignment for the partitions, that covers any smaller block sizes. xp however defaults to the older model, with the first partition starting to the sector No 63 (sector 0 is the Master boot sector and sectors 1-62 aren't in use). In this case, the first partition (usually the system partition and the only one for most mswindows systems) isn't well aligned, with performance problems.

The late GParted versions default to the MiB alignment (although there is the older "cylinder" option too).
To partition an empty drive, you can use GParted with the default settings.
To work on a non-empty drive, you can use GParted to "resize" the existing partition with the "align to MiB" option selected. This will change the start point of the partition. I am not sure if the system will boot immediately after resizing. In case the system partition start sector changes, we usually need to boot from the install cd to "fix" the boot process.

Of course, as usually we recommand a good backup of any important data on the drive.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by Zoomclub

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Re: Help needed please for Gparted Virgin! - With Partion Alignment in XP

Thanks alot for that - figured out how to get it done in the end - combination of GParted and diskpar!?

Cheers for the reply - appreciated

Jon

4 Reply by andublin

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Re: Help needed please for Gparted Virgin! - With Partion Alignment in XP

Can you detail the steps you used for diskpar after gparted?
Thanks.