OUCH- just had MB go west ,followed by HD go somewhere else and a PSU fan go gaga . Looking around , I've got a cheapo 80GB "clean pull " HD , SATA , which I might just put into shelf storeage as a backup .I'm looking at other "clean pull " drives as a place to sit data on ( they'd just sit on the shelf ,doing nothing untill I needed to backup/reinstall /had a failure .)

At the moment due to the East floding problem ,HDD prices are high- I've just got a WD 1TB at not too bad a price .

But it's got this "advanced format" thing on it .

To me - get a disk, partirion it ,install lowest order OS, then work up . At moment - I've got W2K and XP on the temp one . But if I put 2k on a disk ,I've got to put it on something less than 137g .What I do is to make two partitions on my 80g - one of approx 70gb ,and another of 10 . Make the first a DOS STORE ,and the other a DOS version of W2K - that way if anything goes wrong- I can get the data off .Then on new BIG disk install XP and W7.

It's this thing about "advanced format " that bothers me .

Any IT Pro's like to educate me on what this means, preferably in old DOS terms . ( ME- I'm an old computer /e;lectronocs bloke - with an HND in Electronics & cOMMS -,so be gentle)

Long and short of it is that the drive physically has 4k sectors, but presents them out as 512byte sectors at the interface.

So your PC see's it as an old style drive with 512byte sectors even though it isn't.

It was kind of helpful for the stage where you had systems that couldn't do 4k sectors, but IMHO it's more problematic than just dealing with the 4k sector size properly. (Assuming a modern system and OS)

EDIT:

This might help you :

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/whitepapers/eng/2579-771430.pdf

Edited 16 February, 201214 yr by cheezemonkhai

some older machines may have issues booting off modern drives... anything over 2tb needs a very modern "uefi" motherboard to be able to boot off it

some older machines may have issues booting off modern drives... anything over 2tb needs a very modern "uefi" motherboard to be able to boot off it

Mobo is Foxconn A74ML-K - nor exactly hot off the shelf, but not exactly ancient .

So - what do I do - format off a DOS disk or let XP do the works.?

Edited 16 February, 201214 yr by VWD

Mobo is Foxconn A74ML-K - nor exactly hot off the shelf, but not exactly ancient .

So - what do I do - format off a DOS disk or let XP do the works.?

if you were going to be finickety you'd get a partition setup to the 4k boundary (i work in VMware-storage so know allll about the nightmare that is block-alignment haha)

I believe WD do a utility that will actually sort the partition alignment if youve already got stuff on it *OR* theres a couple of pins on the drive that you can jumper to make it automatically change the offsets.

Check out this useful article

The problem with these drives is that when you try and do it in software it can see 512k sectors, but they are not like that in reality.

As Col says, it's a case of using the right tools to partition it and then formatting.

This is a bootable CD, which you can use and should do the alignment appropriate for your drive:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/partedmagic/files/latest/download?source=files

if you were going to be finickety you'd get a partition setup to the 4k boundary (i work in VMware-storage so know allll about the nightmare that is block-alignment haha)

I believe WD do a utility that will actually sort the partition alignment if youve already got stuff on it *OR* theres a couple of pins on the drive that you can jumper to make it automatically change the offsets.

Check out this useful article

Thanks Neo - that's what I was looking for - some one in the trade who mucks around with stuff like this . I don't waant to go messing around with a drive that is loking for advanced stuff , and have it fail .