Preparing Advanced Format hard drives for Microsoft Windows installations on HP Business Notebook PCs, Workstations, and Desktop PCs

Using the Unattended Advanced Format Hard Disk Information Tool

The Unattended Advanced Format Hard Disk Information Tool contains a sample VBS script that

calculates and reports the partition alignment.

Note

For a comparison with other Advanced Format Tools from HP and their

current SoftPaq numbers, see Summary of HP Advanced Format tools.

For any updates, check the HP website or SoftPaq Download Manager.

Download and extract the contents of the SoftPaq. Run either AF-Check.cmd or AF-Check.vbs and

review the output for 4 KB and 1 MB alignment. The sample excerpt shown in Figure 3 indicates that

the particular partition is 1 MB-aligned, which also means the partition falls on a 4 KB boundary and

is 4 KB-aligned as well.

Figure 3. Sample output from The Unattended Advanced Format Hard Disk Information Tool

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Partition Alignment Information from Win32_DiskPartition

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Name: Disk #0, Partition #0

BlockSize: 512

BootPartition: True

Size: 232.883 GiB

StartingOffset: 1048576

----- StartingOffset/4096: 256

----- Drive is 4K Aligned: True

----- StartingOffset/1048576: 1

----- Drive is 1MB Aligned: True

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Using DiskExt

1. After the operating system has been installed, download the DISKEXT utility from

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896648; install.

2. Run diskext from the Windows command line.

3. Identify the Partition Starting Offset value of each partition and divide by 4096. If the value is

exactly divisible, the partition is aligned.