RFC: changing start sector in setup-storage

[Toomas Tamm]

On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 21:31 +0100, Michael Tautschnig wrote:

> Should setup-storage be changed, this will affect anyone using preserve options.
> It won't matter that much for fresh installs without preserved partitions, but
> if some partition is preserved and all partitions listed before the preserved
> partition have fixed sizes, setup-storage will fail miserably to determine a
> viable disk layout. If anybody thinks they might be in such a situation, it
> would be nice if they spoke up. 

In my practice, this would be relevant for laptops. Laptop manufacturers
tend to place a recovery partition at the end of the drive. In some
cases these partitions have had some addresses hard-coded into the
partition, so that they cannot be moved to other location on disk.

My usual practice is to reduce the size of the primary Windows
partition, creating a gap where an extended partition can be created for
Linux. The disk layout thus becomes:

Primary 1: Windows C:
Extended:
   Logical 5: Linux /
   Logical 6: Linux /var
   ......
Primary 3: Windows recovery.

I have seen gaps (unallocated space) appearing both before and after the
Linux partitions. I never put much thought into the reasons, but these
may be related to the alignment issues. I can well live with these gaps,
but for someone else this may be relevant.

Toomas Tamm