Unallocated spaces at the beginning & end of the BOOT disk

In Vista and newer, logical drives [ except the one nearest the start of the extended partition ], usually reserve one MiB for an extended boot record, rather than the 63 sectors (31.5 KiB) reserved by alignment based on a CHS geometry. If other partition managers are used then Vista and newer Disk Management may reserve different amounts of space for the EBRs.

Some partition managers will optimise alignment for you.

Download Free AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard - Magic Partition Manager Freeware

SIW2 is definitely one of the forums experts on such matters.
So if I may ask a question.

SIW2 after following your advise and instructions will their be a lost or misused 1mb or more?
Because that seem to be 119baystate concern.

I ask this question because I'm not a expert like SIW2 and gregrocker and I have read post #22 to 27 here.

Partition question : Unallocated Space Before

FYI:
https://kb.acronis.com/content/1884

SIW2 said:

In Vista and newer, logical drives [ except the one nearest the start of the extended partition ], usually reserve one MiB for an extended boot record, rather than the 63 sectors (31.5 KiB) reserved by alignment based on a CHS geometry. If other partition managers are used then Vista and newer Disk Management may reserve different amounts of space for the EBRs.

Some partition managers will optimise alignment for you.

Download Free AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard - Magic Partition Manager Freeware

I did some reading on filesystem organization & the MBR along with some partitioning. I will attempt to parse what you are saying into something I understand. Everything I am saying from this point forward are pretty much questions from me.

First off, I thought anything to do with the boot record resides in "SHADOW" partition of which is conservatively oversized by design. So I don't quite understand why additional unallocated space is necessary for that.

The additional unallocated spaces are not an artifact of a DUAL BOOT system, but more of an artifact of how I told PARTITION WIZARD to split the partitions of that single drive? If so that might explain that I do not have these unallocated spaces on my other DUAL BOOT system where the 2 OSes reside on different drives?

I gather there are differences in block or cluster sizes between file systems of which I guess mine is NTFS. If I choose a partition size that is an EXACT integer multiple of that cluster size then these unallocated spaces are not needed?

Am I getting the picture? If you have a good tutorial on the subject by all means clue me in.

Thanks

119baystate said:

First off, I thought anything to do with the boot record resides in "SHADOW" partition of which is conservatively oversized by design. So I don't quite understand why additional unallocated space is necessary for that.

These "shadow" partitions have nothing to do with unallocated space. Unallocated space is space on a hard drive that has not been partitioned or formatted.
Windows can (but not always) create a System Reserved partition, usually 100 to 128MB, that is used to contain system files and the boot manager.
In addition, UEFI systems can (but not always) have a SYSTEM partition, usually 100MB, that contains system files and boot managers.
And all file systems must create a File Table, usually in the first few sectors of a hard drive, that keeps track of the whole thing. Apple has it's own file system, Linux it's own, etc.

119baystate said:

The additional unallocated spaces are not an artifact of a DUAL BOOT system, but more of an artifact of how I told PARTITION WIZARD to split the partitions of that single drive? If so that might explain that I do not have these unallocated spaces on my other DUAL BOOT system where the 2 OSes reside on different drives?

Partition Wizard will not create these unallocated spaces because Linux does not have a use for them.