Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 83814
interactive partition editor creates newly created partitions in random order
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:50:56 EDT
Description of problem: When creating several partitions using interactive partition editor of the installer, user doesn't have any control over the order in which partitions are really created in. It seems the tool sorts newly created partitions by size, and then allocate them in partition table. This way the biggest partition gets smaller partition index. E.g. swap partitions are not the largest ones, that means that swap partitions move to the end of the disk, where IO is much slower than at the begining.. So user has NO way to place swap partition at the begining of the harddisk, except by NOT using that interactive partition editor.
This is intentional as its the only way we can make sure there is space remaining to add the partitions which are larger and potentially growing. If you mark a partition as "must be primary", then that gives it additional priority and it will get allocated before partitions which don't have primary specified
Utilizing primary partitions is totally wrong for this. Also precise control over the order of partitions should be available at least in the Expert mode, and better yet - it there should be a checkbox somewhere in DiskDruid to control the automatic reordering of partitions.
You can also create partitions by specifying the cylinder range. Double click on a free space region and you can do this.