Invalid sector size 65535, partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary

edit: I think I’ve managed to align my partitions properly (i needed to close my luks encrpytion to move the partition), fdisk no longer gives me a warning, but i still get the ‘invalid sector size’ warning at boot, does anyone know how to identify what could be causing that?

I managed to get to the point of dual booting windows 10 and encrypted manjaro, but on the decrypt prompt at boot it gives me “invalid sector size 65535”, it boots fine otherwise, i got in to manjaro, used fdisk -l and noticed “partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary”.

I googled a bit and found out the latter is probably caused by my SSD using the ‘advanced format’ of 4096 bytes per physical sector instead of 512, is this what is also causing the former ‘invalid sector size’ error? if so, how do i change sector size and will I need to reinstall manjaro after doing so? the SSD affected has the root partition, everything else is on the hard drive, I did boot up gparted but couldnt see an option to adjust sector size.

even if this is no real problem i just prefer to not have an error on boot and don’t like the idea of just hiding it if i can fix it at this stage instead lol.

  1. Take a Crash-proof backup
  2. Boot Parted Live from a USB stick
  3. In gParted, move all partitions to a physical sector boundary
  4. Click Apply
  5. Go sleep
  6. Wake up and hope there was no power failure during the night
  7. Reboot

Bliss! :sunny:

Alternatively, just live with it: it’s just a warning…

:grin:

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Thanks for the reply! How do I move the physical sector boundary in parted tho? Never had to do this b4 and didn’t see the option last I booted to gparted

just move the start of a partition to a multiple of 4096. IIRC parted will tell you when it’s not.

:+1:

Having trouble with that clonezilla set up actually, would be handy to get working, couldnt figure out how to get to the boot.log it drops but the menu entry is here:

menuentry "CloneZilla 2.7.1-22-amd64.iso" {
set ISOFile="/opt/clonezilla-live-2.7.1-22-amd64.iso"
loopback loop ($root)$ISOFile
linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live components config findiso=$ISOFile ip=frommedia toram=filesystem.squashfs union=overlay
initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

is there something obvious im doing wrong? or how do i grab that boot.log?

  1. What’s the output of:

    ls -al /opt/clonezilla-live-2.7.1-22-amd64.iso
    
  2. What’s the error message?

  3. I don’t understand your question: what are you trying to accomplish? Do you want debug information before/during ISO load? There isn’t any as no file systems have been mounted yet… :sob:

:question:

It says boot failed and “the file /boot.log contains some debugging information” so I was trying to get a hold of that cus I thought it might have something useful to help me but couldn’t find it lol

Then it leaves me at initramfs, typing in that command it tells me it (the file/dir) doesn’t exist, but when I boot in to manjaro and navigate there I can see it?

I can’t help you any further then…

:sob:

ah ok no worries! i’ll see if i can figure it out another time and update this post if i do lol

would you have any idea why gparted might not let me move the start of a partition? I saw a lot of posts about extended partitions being a problem but mines not that, encrypted ext4 root partition, only one on my ssd!

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The invalid sector size warning seemed to stop after unplugging a USB hub/SD card reader, can’t say I know why exactly but I did stumble on another post of someone who had a similar issue but it was also keeping them from booting.

I managed to align my partitions correctly by doing as Fabby said, I was unable to at first because I needed to close my luks encryption before changing the start of the partition.

Haven’t got to working out what issue I was having with clonezilla but if i do i’ll update this space.

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