Linux Mint Forums

I'm installing a 2TB WD green drive. Is there anything special I have to do before I partition it? I'm running Mint Debian w/ UDP 4.

Probably not, but that depends on how recent your partitioning software is. See this article I wrote on the subject a while back. Versions of parted, fdisk, and gdisk released in the last year or so generally do the right thing automatically; however, given the severity of the problem if partitions aren't properly aligned, particularly with some filesystems, it's worth double-checking the alignment before writing large amounts of data to the disk.

Thanks. I will be using the GParted version (0.11.0) that is installed with Mint Debian. The hard drive is the newest green model WD20EARX. I'll be sure to check the alignment before I start using it. I just have to get the SATA controllers sorted out first because it drops SATA6, when I plug something into SATA3 which is currently not being used.

Just had to swap some cables around to get things recognized.

Ok, I created two primary partitions and aligned to Mib using GParted. From what I've read, they seemed to be aligned properly. Here's the details... everything look ok?

Yes, both partitions' start points are divisible by 8, so they're fine.