On Saturday 20 February 2010 13:59:38 Stefan Schulte wrote: > Hi Mick, > > AFAIK the asterisk behind the partition just indicates, that it is not > aligned to a cylinder boundary. I think this doesnt have any effect (or > maybe some old OS like DOS depend on it). If you use cfdisk for > partitioning you can avoid that by given the space in c(ylinders). e.g. > New Partition with a size of '100c'. > > I guess your hidden partition has something to do with Windows > behaviour, because if you install Windows and create partitions during > the installation process, it also creates an extra 8MB partition. > Maybe gparted adopted that behaviour. > > But I can't tell you the reason why. Some people say it's for temp data > (which I doubt) and others say it's used to store metadatas if the user > decides to use flexible disks or software RAIDs. > > I just can say that windows is running fine without it on my computer, > because i decided to partition with cfdisk before running the > installation.
Thank you both for your responses. I failed to notice that gparted now has a handy 'align on cylinder' tick box. That's what I think shifts partitions along until there is alignment with the cylinder boundary. -- Regards, Mick
