[Parted-maintainers] Bug#380226: NTFS (partition) not recreated correctly after resize: incorrect start sector

[Otavio Salvador]

Bas Zoetekouw <bas at debian.org> writes:

> Well, does it really matter _why_ they did it?  The problem here (as I
> perceive it, at least), is that parted is for some reason "fixing" the
> starting sector of the partition, while it shouldn't touch the beginning
> of the partition at all.  All it should do is change the _ending_ sector.
>
> Maybe indeed starting a partition at a non-cylinder boundary will break
> Windows (on pre-LBA harddisks, etc).  But if that is the case, then the
> partition table was broken already before parted had anything to do with
> it.  I don't think that in such a situation chaning the ending sector
> will make things worse.
>
> Of course, this is a totally different situation than in the case that
> parted is creating a new partition from scratch.  In such a case, of
> course, it _does_ make sense to write a sane parition table with
> partitions starting at cylinder boundaries only.
>
> So IMO this should be fixed by somehow restricting the parition aligning
> to the ending sector only, and not have libparted and _partition_align()
> touch the begin sector of the partition at all, if the partition is
> being resized.  In the case that a new partition is created, everything
> should stay as it is, and both beginning and ending sector should be
> aligned.

Well, partially you're right.

The problem here is how to decide if we should or not align it. That's
the most difficult question...

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