"Partition # does not end on cylinder boundary" after restore of a partition from Veritas System Recovery for Linux

Problem

After restoring a partition using Veritas System Recovery for Linux (VSR-L), the partition table of the system becomes overlapped.  Error "Partition # does not end on cylinder boundary" appears with fdisk -l command.

Error Message

Partition # does not end on cylinder boundary.

Solution

Cylinder-Head-Sector (CHS) is a legacy method for addressing physical blocks on a hard drive.  The head and sector per track remains constant for a disk and only the cylinder value is changed to point to any location on the disk.  For most hard disks the head and sector per track is 255 and 63 and it is set by the hard disk manufacturer.  

Linux does not use the CHS values.  The man fdisk page states “DOS uses C/H/S only, Windows uses both, Linux never uses C/H/S.”

Logical Block Array (LBA) is the modern method of accessing any location on the harddisk.  Each sector on the disk is numbered starting from 0.  For example, LBA 10 on the disk represent 10 x 512(If sector size is 512 bytes) = 5120 byte offset on the disk.

Since fdisk does not use the hardware CHS value instead it uses default Sector=63 and Head=255.  VSR-L while restoring gets the actual CHS values from the disk and set the CHS values in the partition table accordingly.

As Linux does not use the CHS value, the "Partition # does not end on cylinder boundary" error report from fdisk -l command does no harm to the system and can be safely ignore.  Users can use the fdisk utility to manually correct the CHS values if desired.