TIH 2011 - Cloning Win7 = not aligned before, not aligned after - RESOLVED
So my first foray into SSD went pretty smooth. Cloned the Win7 laptop and afterwards all partitions were aligned.
Tried same with the desktop today. Checked alignment before this time and all boot disk partitions/4096 as expected. After the clone, only the first partition was aligned - the recovery partition. The Win7 100mb partition and the one containing the OS failed the alignment test.
I chose automatic cloning, and noticed the new partitions were resized proportionally. Bad choice?
Do ALL partitions need to be aligned?
I've read post here about the 1mb before the first partition but that field was disabled when I chose the manual method and tried to 'edit' the settings.
I'm trying again now, clone, manual, "as-is". Expecting everything to be aligned. If so, then stretch out the last partition later to pick up the extra space.
https://kb.acronis.com/content/2699
"If you restore or clone a disk image to an SSD disk, the recovered/cloned primary partitions will be aligned to the default starting offset 1024kb (2048 sectors)."
With TIH2011, that statement is apparently not always true. I've tried Clone and Restore from a full Disk backup and in each case none of the partitions end up aligned - even though two were aligned on the HDD to begin with.
Found a solution. Used EaseUS Todo Backup Workstation boot CD that I had bought back in 2011. Nothing special, just a straight clone but I checked the box to align for SSD. Gonna show my appreciation by upgrading to their current release!
Using this command to check the alignment - wmic partition get BlockSize, Index, Name, StartingOffset
Using TIH 2011 (6942) and Clone...
BlockSize Index Name StartingOffset
512 0 Disk #0, Partition #0 32256
512 1 Disk #0, Partition #1 41126400
512 2 Disk #0, Partition #2 11729249280
Using EaseUS...
BlockSize Index Name StartingOffset
512 0 Disk #0, Partition #0 4096
512 1 Disk #0, Partition #1 40370176
512 2 Disk #0, Partition #2 11723603968
In fairness, EaseUS failed to work on my latest system migration to SSD. SSD alignment was checked but nothing was aligned afterwards. Forget the version of EaseUS I used above that worked.
But, I made an image backup (for sanity) with TIH 2010 before doing anything and used TIH 2011 to restore that image backup to the SSD. Everything was aligned afterwards.
Mileage varies I guess.
Note to self. Could have been TIH clone that didn't align properly. TIH 2011 restore so far has now aligned two different SSD's correctly.