In KDE Partition Manager there are three dialogs dealing with a partition sizes, all of them using the same code base internally. These dialogs are: the dialog to create a new partition, the one to resize an existing partition and the dialog to insert a copied or imported partition.

One thing that was not really optimal in version 1.0 was that partition alignment (and we all remember from the last installment what an important topic that is) took place outside of those dialogs and therefore after the user had accepted the changes.

Alignment Again

In other words, the user makes a size adjustment in one of the dialogs and only after he has finished doing so is alignment taken into account. In an extreme worst-case scenario the alignment code will have to make the partition smaller than the user intended it to be. In that case a warning will be printed. This is a very unlikely scenario, but it can happen.

So that was the situation in 1.0. What has improved with KDE Partition Manager 1.1?

If we take a look at the new resize dialog, not much has seemed to have changed at first glance:

Looking more closely you can see that the spin boxes now have thousand-separators. This is especially important when dealing with large disks and partitions as the readability of large numbers is greatly improved.

Also the spin boxes now accept fractions of values, giving the user increased flexibility and accuracy when moving or resizing partitions.

And of course there is a very prominent advanced button at the dialog's bottom. Here's what we get after clicking it:

The two additional spin boxes make it possible to directly modify the partition's start and end sector. So if for whatever reason you require complete control over where your partitions begin and end on your drive this will be exactly what you are looking for.

Only that all this wouldn't be of much use as long as the application was still aligning partitions behind your back. But it doesn't do that anymore: All aligning now takes place directly inside the size dialogs while the user makes adjustments, so that it is instantly visible and controllable.

And not only that -- here's where the checkbox you already noticed right at the bottom comes into play: KDE Partition Manager 1.1 will only align the partition you're resizing or moving (to cylinder boundaries or to whatever you have configured) as long as this checkbox is ticked. Untick it and alignment is (temporarily) suspended.

With Great Power Comes Great Destructiveness

So with the help of this checkbox and the two sector-related spin boxes the user has complete and fine grained control over the location and size of his partitions. Of course this does not invalidate the performance factors mentioned in the last installment regarding physical versus logical partition alignment.

In other words: If you do not exactly know what you are doing leave the settings in the advanced setctions of the size-related dialogs alone.

This concludes part four in a sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1. Part one was about Mount Management, part two dealt with SMART Status Reports and part three offered a very technical look behind the scenes on the topic of Support For 4096-Byte Sectors.