HP Pro 6305 Preparing Advanced Format hard drives for Microsoft Windows instal - Page 11

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 Partition Alignment Information from Win32_DiskPartition 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 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. 11