OK, I dunno why, but if I boot into a Windows PE environment and create a partition for Windows XP, because I wanted to try a cluster size bigger than 4 KB with NTFS, make it active with Disk Management and then reboot with the XP install CD. The text mode setup goes through without a single error, but, when text mode setup is done and I reboot, instead of the XP logo, this error message appears instead:

A disk read error occurred

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

This was even when I used an XP environment and the HDD isn't failing.

Edited December 17, 201114 yr by RJARRRPCGP

Unless you have an XP RTM or SP1 installation media disc, this is going to fail. There are ways to make it work (usually by copying certain files from an SP1 i386 folder over the SP2 or SP3 versions before install), but note that any update that updates these files will hose your installation afterwards anyway.

What are the reasons for installing XP onto a volume with larger than 4K NTFS clusters anyway?

Unless you have an XP RTM or SP1 installation media disc, this is going to fail. There are ways to make it work (usually by copying certain files from an SP1 i386 folder over the SP2 or SP3 versions before install), but note that any update that updates these files will hose your installation afterwards anyway.

What are the reasons for installing XP onto a volume with larger than 4K NTFS clusters anyway?

I was starting to suspect that even 4 KB clusters was causing high CPU usage.

(Or slowing down file access for 8 KB and bigger files.)

And I thought only Win 2000 would have a problem with this lol.

So you're saying that SP3 broke it and made it a downgrade from SP0!

(I'm also looking at you, NTDETECT.COM!)

Edited December 18, 201114 yr by RJARRRPCGP

No, I'm saying there was a change in XP SP2 which made the difference. However, booting to a volume with larger than 4K clusters is generally a performance and disk space waste - data volumes with large file sizes are really the only way that larger clusters will make a large difference, and XP isn't really designed to be booted from a drive like that. It can use them, sure, but booting from one isn't as nice.

No, I'm saying there was a change in XP SP2 which made the difference. However, booting to a volume with larger than 4K clusters is generally a performance and disk space waste - data volumes with large file sizes are really the only way that larger clusters will make a large difference, and XP isn't really designed to be booted from a drive like that. It can use them, sure, but booting from one isn't as nice.

I was experimenting for basically a non-RAID version of bigger chunk sizes, because a lot a files are 16+ KB, even for the boot.

So, I tried 8 KB, just to see if earlier CPUs would have less utilization.

Edited December 19, 201114 yr by RJARRRPCGP