I always seem to come across this error every time I'm trying to partition a drive with parted. I want to use the whole drive, but I can never seem to get the alignment right. When you try to partition a drive using parted and you do the "mkpart" command you have to choose partition name, file system type, start, and end. The start and end is where I have the issue. Do I start on zero or 1 and how do I easily know what the end of the disk is? When you do this wrong the error you usually get is "Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.". That error does not inspire confidence. Here is the best way I have found to use the full disk size with 1 partition.
When asked about start and end we are going to use percentages like so.
(parted) mkpart Partition name? []? 1 File system type? [ext2]? ext4 Start? 0% End? 100%
You could also do this from the command line like
sudo parted /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
Doing this will leave some free space at the start and end of the disk, but it will make sure the partition is properly aligned for best performance.
(parted) print free
Model: ATA SAMSUNG SSD 830 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 128GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
17.4kB 1049kB 1031kB Free Space
1 1049kB 128GB 128GB primary
128GB 128GB 335kB Free Space
One last check for alignment.
(parted) align-check opt 1 1 aligned
