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Alignment and Disk Director Suite questions

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Searched but I haven't been able to figure out clearly what is the situation with Disk Director Suite (10 & 11) and alignment . I would appreciate some simplified explanations, if possible :)

1. Does Director create (automatically) properly aligned partitions ? (for SSDs and AF HDDs) ?
2. Does it retain alignment when editing aligned partitions ?

3. If it does 1&2 , which versions do and with what operating systems ? (eg maybe 11 does 1&2 but it would not perform those functions if installed in XP lets say?)

Thanks

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Anatoli:

Disk Director 10 does not create "aligned" (1 MB or 2048-sector offset) partitions; it follows the old partitioning rules from the XP days (31.5 kB or 63-sector offset).

Disk Director 11 can create 1 MB offset partitions under certain circumstances:

1. It detects an installation of Windows Vista or Windows 7 on the PC, and the user chooses one of these operating systems as the Disk Layout, or
2. DD 11 is run from its recovery CD and the user selects the "Bootable Media Environment" Disk Layout. This applies regardless of the operating system(s) detected, or on blank disks with no operating system.

Otherwise, DD 11 will use the old 31.5 kB rules. The screen shot below is from the DD 11 boot CD running on a virtual machine with an XP operating system installed on the virtual disk:

Under "Detected OSs" the first choice "Bootable Media Environment" will result in 1 MB offset partitions and the second choice "Microsoft Windows XP SP3" will result in 31.5 kB offset partitions.

As for retaining alignment when editing partitions, I have not experimented enough with this to be confident that it does. However, based on the older DD 10 behavior, if you don't move the starting sector of the partition then alignment should be preserved. If you do, the results (again, based on experience with DD 10) can be unpredictable. DD has never been very strict about keeping the size or the ending sector of a partition aligned to anything in particular, and I never had confidence that it would. Windows 7 Diskpart or Disk Management is very strict about this and the results are predictable partitions with 1 MB offsets and sizes that are multiples of 1 MB.

If you want predictability, back up the contents of your partitions with True Image 2011. Then use Windows 7 Diskpart to delete and create partitions of the desired size. Then restore their contents with True Image 2011. This will always work correctly because TI 2011 will use an existing partition table entry if you restore to an existing partition and don't resize during the restore.

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markwharton wrote:
If you want predictability, back up the contents of your partitions with True Image 2011. Then use Windows 7 Diskpart to delete and create partitions of the desired size. Then restore their contents with True Image 2011. This will always work correctly because TI 2011 will use an existing partition table entry if you restore to an existing partition and don't resize during the restore.

1. By diskpart you mean the default windows 7 disk management tools from administrative tools ? ("computer management i think its called?)
2. Can TI 2010 work this same way as TI 2011 ?

Thank you

Anatoli:

1. You can use Windows 7 Disk Management to perform some operations, but if you are going to delete and re-create partitions from scratch, then you need to use the DiskPart utility. DiskPart is a command-line utility that is included with Windows 7 and is also available in the Windows Recovery Environment ("Repair Your PC") on a Windows 7 DVD. Instructions are here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770877(WS.10).aspx

2. I'm not sure, but I think that TI 2010 worked in the same way. Perhaps someone else on the forum can comment.