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Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:47:34 -0700 (MST)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: "Lucas B. Cohen" <lbc@bnrlabs.com>
Subject: Re: Manually partitioning using gpart
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Cc: Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@rocketmail.com>, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
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On Mon, 26 Nov 2012, Lucas B. Cohen wrote:

> On 2012.11.25 21:49, Warren Block wrote:
>> For a hard drive, 4K alignment and starting the main partition at 1M is
>> good.
> Why would one leave 1024 full kbits before the first partition on a HDD ?

The second only is only relevant to GPT.

We went over this last week, but briefly there are two reasons: 
compatibility with what few GPT standards are out there (Windows and 
others), and proper alignment on hard drives and SSDs.

It's not the first partition, but the first filesystem partition.  The 
boot partition can go in the space before it.