Hello.

Recently I came into a problem with partitioning WD20EARS disk (with 4k sectors). I needed partitions to be aligned correctly so I just used parted in "unit s" mode and started all partitions at mod8 sector (drive itself reports, that sector is 512b) and ended all of them at mod8-1 sector.

But then I thought, that may be I should take into account also the cylinder boundaries (I've seen some posts on the net where fdisk complains about partitions not to start/end on cylinder boundary). And then... I thought, that if drive lies about it's sector size, may be it's lying about the whole geometry?

Should I care about partitions to be aligned against cylinder boundaries? If so, how do I find these boundaries? I guess each drive model can contain different sectors per track/cylinder... Or sector alignment is all I should take care of?