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WDXXEARS and 4K sectors, alignment issue


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Well, just bought a Western Digital WD10EARS hard disk drive. I connected it to my system running Windows XP and made two primary partitions in NTFS format.

So, in the first partition cloned my old Windows XP installation from another drive using Norton Ghost, and in the second partition copied all my data files from my other hdd. Then, inserted Windows XP installation CD and got into the Windows XP Recovery Console to make a "FIXBOOT" or "FDISK /MBR" (not sure what I was going to do) so Windows could start from this new disk, but, for my surprise, hard disk partitions were not recognized... Back to my other Windows XP installation and having the WD10EARS connected as secondary drive, the disk is recognized as a 32MB drive with no partitions/no format at all.

So, a little "google-ing" later, I managed to download and run a utility called "HDD Capacity Restore", and then my two partitions were back with all my data and the correct drive capacity too.

The next day, I noticed that this drive is made to support new sector (or cluster) size of 4096 bytes, and for older operating systems that don't support this feature, it provides emulation of 512 bytes sectors... Windows Vista and Windows 7 support new cluster size and don't need anything special to do.

So, Western Digital recommends to use "Advanced Format Align Utility" to align the partitions with the physical clusters in disk so you can achieve full performance... Did it last night, it took about 5 hours, and the disk seems to work normally but I'm not confidence with this drive and don't know what will happend if i try to run Windows XP Recovery Console again and don't know how to make this drive bootable with my cloned XP installation.

I will continue investigating and share results with all of you, any idea would be appreciated.

Edit: confirmed and corrected "HDD Capacity Restore" utility name

Edited by pedrojpz
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Disk alignment is not a big problem.

Simply you change the number of hidden sectors to a multiple of 4 Kb.

By default XP uses 63 hidden sectors, thus the disk is "misaligned", as 63x512=32,256/4,096=7.875

By default Vista and I think 7 also, use a much bigger number of hidden sectors, usually around 1 Mbyte, if I recall correctly. :unsure:

Compare with these:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?sho...c=21186&hl=

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=88270

BUT be VERY aware of this issue:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...ic=9897&hl=

not yet fully cleared/solved, if you are planning to use XP partitioning tools on that disk.

jaclaz

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My Windows Xp installation CD is SP3.

So, got into the recovery console again and this time it recognized partitions correctly, so tried to do a FIXBOOT and FIXMBR but I think I made it in the incorrect partition, because for some reason C: drive was my second partition and the D: drive was the partition with the Windows files, I received "Missing NTLDR".

Then, tried to explicity do "FIXBOOT C:" and "FIXMBR \Device\HardDisk0\Partition1" but it didn't work and the partition gone illegible, just appeared as unformatted. So, last step was to install Windows in a 'clean way', but I ended up with the Windows files in the correct partition C: but the NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and other system files are now in the D: partition!!!! It works but....

So, now, I'm going to erase partitions and start the whole thing again! I think I will create the two partitions, run the WD align utility and then install windows and copy all my data files in the second partition.

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