correct alignment for 4096bytes disk - begginer

[silvia_g]

hey I've been using ubuntu for a couple of years now, but I am still an absolute begginer, please be kind..:)
I've bought a dell inspiron a month ago, and installed ubuntu 12.04 in a separate partition (since they made me pay for windows 7 I figured it was best to keep it there, in a small partition); then a week ago I started having huge problems, first during boot there were a lot of messages saying the disk had bad sectors, and now it doesn't boot at all;
googling and reading I think the problem is I have a disk divided in 4096 physical sectors and the table partition isn't aligned, so I'd like to reinstall everything from scratch with a propper alignment table, but I just can't manage to find instructions I'm able to understand;
if someone could please share a comprehensive how-to for this situation, or direct me to some article where there's an explanation on how to proceed I'd much appreciate it;
also, I understand I should post the outcome of some command in order to provide accurate info on the problem I have, but don't know at one to use - just tell me what to do and I'll post it here!
thank you in advance, I hope someone will help me!
Silvia

/ ok so I-ve managed to boot from the cd, take pictures of disl utility and gparted outputs as well as fdisk l

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x07f2837e

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 208844 104391 de Dell Utility
Partition 1 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda2 * 212992 41172991 20480000 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 41172992 215252719 87039864 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 215252990 1465147391 624947201 5 Extended
Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda5 215252992 275253247 30000128 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 275255296 291254271 7999488 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 291256320 1465147391 586945536 83 Linux

[dino99]

several possible steps:

boot on windoz then do a chkdsk (or so)
boot on ubuntu, then into a terminal: sudo shutdown -R now

and if you does not really care about the Dell partition stuff, then format it :p

note: of course, each time you want to use a formatting tool, like gparted, its ALWAYS with unmounted partition.

[oldfred]

Your first partition starts at sector 63 which was the old way with XP. Vista changed to 2048 for better compatibility with newer drives. Linux/gparted changed but more recently to also use 2048 as the first sector.

You are showing a newer 4K drive

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes

First, understand that most partitioning tools have moved to a policy of aligning partitions on 1 MiB (2048-sector) boundaries as a way of improving performance with some types of arrays and some types of new hard disks (those with 4096-byte physical sectors). See article by srs5694:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/
Post on 8-sector boundaries alignment by srs5694
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1685666
it's 8-sector (4096-byte) alignment - post 8
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1768635
Alignment issues on 4K drives
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1635018
srs's to show 8 sector alignment
$ sudo parted /dev/sda unit s print

But you cannot easily move Windows as the partition boot sector as to match the partition start and size. So any movement of the Windows partition corrupts the partition boot sector and requires repairs from a Windows repairCD or USB.

[silvia_g]

Ei finally, I formatted the pc and instaled ubuntu, working just fine now.
Thank you everybody for your help.