Recently, a friend from a forum asked away about what he would need to be cautious about when installing Windows 98 to a flash medium, like an SSD or in his case an IDE CompactFlash card. While this is the extreme case, people tend to ask such questions also for Windows XP and XP x64 or other older systems. So I thought I’d show you, using this Win98 + CF card case as an example. Most of the stuff would be similar for more “modern” systems like maybe Windows 2000, XP, Linux 2.4 etc. anyway.
For this, we are going to use the bootable CD version of [gparted]. In case you do not know gparted yet, you can think of it as an OpenSource PartitionMagic, that you can also boot from CD or USB. If you know other graphical partition managers, you will most likely feel right at home with gparted. Since this article is partially meant as a guide for my friend, parts of the screenshots will show german language, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. First, let’s boot this thing up from CD (or USB key if you have no optical drive). See the following series of screenshots, it’s pretty self-explanatory:
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- Pick default settings in the boot loader
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- Pick your key map by arch
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- In my case it’s QWERTZ for a german keyboard
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- German layout
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- No Apple keyboard please
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- ‘latin1 – no dead keys’ is usually my default
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- German language for the system
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- And finally, let the X11 choose its defaults for the GUI
Now that we’re up and running you will be presented with a list of available drives accessible at “GParted / devices”. In our case we don’t need to do that as we only have one device posing as a 16GB large CompactFlash card as you will see below. Since this is a factory-new device, we shall assume that it will be unformatted and unpartitioned. If it IS pre-formatted you would need to check the given alignment first, see below to understand what i mean. But you can also just delete whatever partitions are on there if you don’t need any data from the device and proceed with this guide afterwards.
What we will do is create a properly aligned partition, so we won’t create unnecessary wear on our NAND flash and so we won’t sacrifice performance. This is critical especially for slower flash media, because if you’re going to install an operating system onto that, you’d really feel the pain with random I/O on a misaligned partition (seek performance drops, far too large reads/writes would occur etc.). Just follow these steps here to partition the device and pre-format it with FAT32. If you’re on Windows 2000 or newer, you may want to choose NTFS instead, for Linux choose whatever bootable file system your target distribution understands, like maybe JFS or something. If your flash medium supports TRIM (newer SATA SSDs do), choose EXT4, XFS or BTRFS instead, for BSD UNIX pick UFS or ZFS if you are ok with those:
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- This is what you’ll be presented at first
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- First, create a partition table
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- We’ll do ‘msdos’, which is MBR. For devices >2TB pick GPT!
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- Right-click on the table, and create a new partition
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- Make sure it’s aligned to MiB! Also, pick your file system of choice.
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- All set, now apply those changes to make gparted do its work!
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- Done! You can check for proper alignment again here.
This is it, our partition starts at sector number 2048 (1MiB, or 1MB as I tend to say), which will work for all known flash media. If you expect your medium to have larger blocks, you could set the start to sector 20480 instead, which would mean 10MB. I don’t think there are media out there with blocks THAT large, but by doing this you could be a 100% certain that it’ll be aligned. Time to shut gparted down:
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- Yeah, that ain’t hard
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- You need to double-click that ‘Exit’ button, or it won’t work
After that, you may still re-format the partition from DOS or legacy Windows, but make sure to not re-partition the disk from within a legacy operating system, so no fdisk and no disk management partitioning stuff in Win2000/XP!
On a side note, FAT32 file systems as shown here can’t be [TRIM]’ed on Windows, so when the media gets enough write cycles, writes will permanently slow down, with maybe garbage collection helping a little bit. You could hook that FAT32-formatted disk up to a modern Linux and TRIM it there though, if it’s a new enough SATA drive. In my friends’ case that’s not an issue anyway, as he is using IDE/PATA flash that doesn’t support the TRIM command to begin with. But if you do have a modern enough SATA system and a TRIM-capable SSD, you might want to go with NTFS for Windows or EXT4/BTRFS/XFS for Linux as well as UFS/ZFS for BSD UNIX if you can, as those file systems are supported by current TRIM implementations, or yeah, FAT32 for data exchange between operating systems. Keep in mind though, to TRIM FAT32 SATA SSDs, Linux is required at the time of this writing.
And no, no IDE/PATA media can say “TRIM” as far as I know.
Also: You can re-align existing partitions with gparted in a somewhat similar fashion as shown above by just editing them. This may be useful if you messed up with DOS or WinXP and have already installed your system on a misaligned partition. Gparted will then have to re-align the entire file system on that partition though, and that may take hours, e.g. for my Intel 320 600GB SSD (about 400GB full) it took almost 3 hours. To see which file systems gparted supports for re-alignment, [look here] (It’s mostly “shrink” that is required)!
Pre-aligning a partition for use on an SSD © 2013 by The GAT at XIN.at is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
