RE: Wheezy Installer Auto-Partition Oddity

[Bonno Bloksma <b.bloksma@tio.nl>]

Hi, Patrick,

>> [snip]
>>>  >
>>>  > FWIW, the wheezy installer created the same  partitioning scheme 
>>> on a hard drive  > install the first time I gave wheezy a run.  I 
>>> found  that rather odd and a good  > reason to manually partition the 
>>> drive prior to  installing wheezy in the  > future.  I usually do 
>>> that but was being a bit lazy  this one time.  ;)
>>> 
>>> 
>>>  Thanks.  Now, I know it's not just my install or a quirk in  
>>> VirtualBox.  It's the installer.
>>> 
>>>  Since my original post, I've been reading up on GPT.  Based  on 
>>> that, plus what others have posted here, it seems the  cause of the 
>>> gaps is a combination of aligning partitions  based 4096 byte 
>>> sectors, regardless of whether they are that  size, and LVM needing 
>>> unpartitioned space between partitions  for metadata whether you're 
>>> using LVM or not.  Mostly, the  latter, I think.
>>> 
>>>  Like you, for the real install, I'll just manually  partition.  Gap, 
>>> LVM and GPT "problems" solved.
>>> 
>> 
>> Just for the record . . . that install was to an old WD 80gb drive 
>> that was around long before the new sector changes.
>
> Mine, too.  WD 160GB purchased late 2006.  512 byte sectors.

I don't think the installer looks at the disk type. It will just use 1M boundaries for starting a new partition.
Why it ends the previous partition just beyond that 1M boundary and then has to skip 2047 512b sectors I do not know, that might be a minor bug.

And ah.... who the heck cares about 1M on a 100+ GB or nowadays on a 1+ TB disk? ;-)

Bonno Bloksma