On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 1:13 PM, Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote: > > On Mar 4, 2012 12:54 AM, "Grant" <emailgr...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >>> I just received the new Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook and I'm trying to >> >>> install Gentoo but I can't get install-amd64-minimal-20120223.iso to >> >>> boot via a USB key. >> >> >> >> Have you tested your boot USB keys on another machine? >> > >> > Gentoo is installed but I can't get my USB->ethernet adapter to bring >> > up an eth0 (or any other) interface. It works if I boot the Kubuntu >> > USB key. I've definitely built the correct driver into the kernel >> > (mcs7380). I'm going through an emerge world right now to bring >> > everything up to date. Is there anything else I might need to do? >> > >> > - Grant >> >> I enabled some more kernel options under USB Network Adapters and it's >> working now. The install is about done but there were a few >> peculiarities: >> >> 1. fdisk won't let me specify a start block before 2048 even though I >> deleted all partitions. >> > > That's normal. It's a long story, but Windows Vista and Windows 7 expects > the first partition to start at sector 2048. > > You can force a lower number by toggling "DOS compatibility"; this should > let you start the first partition as low as sector 63. > > HOWEVER, make sure that all partitions begin at multiples of 8 (e.g., 64, > 72, 80, and so on); this will save you a lot of grief if it happens that the > hard disk you're using has 4KiB-sectors. [1]
<snip the rest> >From what I recall of looking at that toy's specs, it's running on an SSD, so it becomes even more important, performance-wise, to have things aligned properly so any one write doesn't cause two full erase blocks to be cycled. The 1MB alignment is, if I recall, a balance Microsoft struck as the midpoint between multiple hardware vendors to work well on any of them... raid arrays, SSDs, advanced format hard drives with 4k sectors on-disk, etc. -- Poison [BLX] Joshua M. Murphy
