Dell A03 manual Other Partition Alignment Requirements, Partition Alignment Options

Dell Latitude E-Family & Mobile Precision Reimage “How-To” Guide

3.3 Other Partition Alignment Requirements

Environment	Action
IRRT / RAID 0,1 & 5 Configuration	Use Alignment Tools(1) to ensure Advanced Format drive
	partitions are properly aligned
Data Protection / Encryption	Use Alignment Tools(1) to ensure Advanced Format drive
	partitions are properly aligned before encrypting the drive.
	Note: Misaligned encrypted Advanced Format drives need to be
	decrypted, then aligned and re-encrypted

(1) Please refer to the Partition Alignment Tools - Section 3.4

3.4Partition Alignment Options

Partition alignment is required for older operating systems and is recommended for new operating systems in order to insure proper hard drive performance and imaging between drives of differing sector sizes. An aligned partition is when the starting offset of the partition is divisible by 4096 Bytes or by 8 for logical block addressing (LBA) numbers.

3.4.1Pre-Installation of Operating System

This section lists a few options for partition alignment pre-installation of OS:

-Using Ghost:

Ghost 11.5 will maintain the alignment state of the Gold/Master image. If the disk image is built and aligned on a 512e/Advanced Format drive, the clones of that image will remain aligned. If the image is built on a 512B, Ghost command line switch {-align=1MB} can be used to ensure alignment when deployed to any drive.

-Using DISKPART:

DISKPART may be used to enable storage configuration or create a partition at an explicit disk offset from a script, a remote session, or another command prompt.

Dell recommends using WinPE's (3.0 or greater) Diskpart.exe from Windows Vista or Windows 7 to create the partitions for Windows XP installation. This will create a partition that is Advanced Format aligned. Without PE, starting with Windows Vista or Windows 7 DVD to create the partition for the Windows XP will create correct partitioning. On how to use DISKPART utility and how to divide the offset value of the selected partition, refer to Microsoft KB Article 300415

3.4.2Post-Installation of Operating System

The Paragon Alignment Tool (PAT) is a hardware agnostic tool available for download from the Dell Support website in Dell Drivers and Downloads for your system under the SATA Drives section. This tool can be used after an Operating System is installed to align the partitions of an Advanced Format drive.