Warning: Partition X does not end on cylinder boundary. Should I care/how to fix?

My output of

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 750 GB, 750153761280 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sda1   *           1        5860    47070418   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            5861       91201   685493550    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            5861        6103     1943865   82  Linux swap
Warning: Partition 5 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda6            6104       91201   683541652   83  Linux
Warning: Partition 6 does not end on cylinder boundary.

/dev/sda1 is my root partion, /dec/sda5 is swap and /dev/sda6 us my home partition.

I'm not sure if these warnings are new, or if I had them since I set up the sytsem in the first place.

What do these warnings tell me? Should I care or be worried? And if so, how to fix it?

I searched the internet, but found a lot of different informations, some of them obviously wrong, so I hope to find some answers here.

Dario Seidl

Posted 2011-09-24T00:08:35.270

Reputation: 2 409

Answers

They tell you exactly what they say. No, you shouldn't care about that. Your cylinders are complete fictions and no actual operating system, not even MS-DOS, has actually itself cared about such alignment. This is a pointless message from fdisk, which is over three years behind other disc partitioning utilities and showing no signs of improving. Get yourself an up-to-date partitioning tool that doesn't have this silliness, and that does 4KiB alignment or similar, such as gdisk.

JdeBP

Posted 2011-09-24T00:08:35.270

Reputation: 23 855

Ok, thanks for the answer. I guessed it would be nothing to worry about. Btw. I'm using fdisk only to get a quick overview of my disks and partitions, for partition management I usually use parted or gparted anyway. – Dario Seidl – 2011-09-24T12:27:29.587