[Parted-maintainers] Bug#402520: parted: can't (easily) resize partitions to end on cylinder boundary

[Arthur Marsh]

Package: parted
Version: 1.7.1-3
Severity: wishlist


I have a disk that fdisk displays as follows:

fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4865.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40020664320 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1785    14337981    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2            1786        4098    18571172    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda3            4113        4866     6052032   83  Linux
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hda5            1786        3040    10071936   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3040        3161      975712+  82  Linux swap / 
Solaris
/dev/hda7            3161        4095     7499488+   b  W95 FAT32

I have been unable to figure out how to get parted to move the end of 
partition 2 to a cylinder boundary, even though there is free space 
before and after the end of partition 2.

Could the parted documentation be updated to include details on how to 
ensure that the end of a partition is on a cylinder boundary?

Regards,

Arthur.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages parted depends on:
ii  libc6                        2.3.6.ds1-9 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libncurses5                  5.5-5       Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  libparted1.7-1               1.7.1-3     The GNU Parted disk partitioning s
ii  libreadline5                 5.2-1       GNU readline and history libraries

parted recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information