# GParted partitioning options, align to cylinder or to MiB ?



## jrbuergel (Jan 17, 2004)

For the GParted partitioning options, when creating or changing a partition on a SATA hard drive, which option is best to use; (align to cylinder, or to MiB )? The newest version of GParted I used, and it did default to "align to MiB, which then created 1 MB gaps between some partitions. Is it better to have no gaps, and is this new version safe to use to move and or resize NTFS windows partitions ? Will it include the boot sector when it moves or resizes ntfs ?
I had a 25 GB XP partition as the 2nd, with a 70 GB as first partition, then I did shrink that first one by 5 GB, then I grew the XP partition into that now unallocated space, so to 30 GB. And it all seemed to go well, the folders and files were still there, and the XP ntfs file system checked good, and with the Vista boot manager it said error when I did try to boot XP, ( ntldr missing or corrupt ) so I put a fresh copy of that file there, and it starting booting XP but hung long time on that XP screen with 2 shades of blue, so I finally did a full clean re-install. So with the GParted tool it does not seem to work well when moveing or resizing to the left, (towards the beginning part of the hard drive), but to the right does work fine.


----------



## lewmur (Sep 11, 2006)

If you had used the repair option with the XP cd, to run fixboot, you probably wouldn't have needed to reinstall.


----------



## jrbuergel (Jan 17, 2004)

Just before I did the full re-install, I booted to my XP CD and into the Recovery Console, which I then ran fixboot to repair the XP boot sector. I have a triple boot system running; XP Pro, Vista 64 bit, and Windows 7, so using the boot manager method. And from in Vista I looked at the folders and files for XP which all seemed to be there fine, and then I ran the check disk for the XP partition, so the ntfs file system did check good. Then it did start loading XP up to that 2 shaded blue screen, but got no further than that and just hung there. So then I booted again to the XP CD to run a repair re-install, which never completed fully, since a message box came up that said select the drive where windows files can be copied from, so clicking the drop down box to select drive letters for both my DVD/CD optical drives did not allow it to finish. So then it was stuck in a re-starting XP repair re-install cycle, even with the XP CD removed. To get out of this cycle I booted to my Vista DVD to run the start up repair to put the boot code back on the master boot record to have the Vista and 7 boot manager back. Then at this point I booted to the XP CD for doing a full fresh re-install, which did complete fine, after which I had to again boot to the Vista DVD to do the start up repair for the boot manager. And finally I used the easy BCD application to add XP to the boot menu, and now all works good.


----------

