To be able to get Ghost 2003 working with Windows 7, one of the things to remember when installing Windows 7 is to pre-partition and pre-format the drive from within e.g. Windows XP to get the partitions aligned correctly.

Now, the new drives have 4 kB sectors with 512-byte emulation. I have read the Advanced Format Technology Brief from Hitachi but am not sure that I understand.

On page 3, they distinguish "Advanced Format Aware Operating Systems" from "Legacy Operating Systems". As I understand it, this difference is what we have utilized when pre-partitioning and pre-formating. To be able to use the new drives, this can not be done and in concequence, Ghost 2003 is "out".

Am I right?

Using Diskpart....

boot from a Win7 disk
at the Install Windows screen, press SHIFT F10 to get a Command prompt

type diskpart and press Enter
list disk
select disk 0 (use the number relevant to your HD)
list disk (there will be an * next to your selected disk)
clean (use this if you want to delete all partitions on the selected HD)
create partition primary size=80000 (use whatever size in MiB you desire)
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick 
assign
exit
exit

You are now ready to install Win7 into this partition. You can create other partitions (using Disk Management) after Win7 is installed.

Christer

WinXP creates Cylinder aligned partitions and they are compatible with Ghost 2003. So for your purposes that is correct. But the Advanced Format HDs may be a different matter.

Christer

Christer wrote on Jan 25^th, 2012 at 3:57pm:

Okay, I briefly scanned that information--and I was left confused by it myself as well.

Quoting from that PDF file:

Quote:

So, before we continue too much further with this discussion--is *Advanced Format Technology* a software or a *hardware* based technology?

The above quote seems to be saying that a HDD with this technology is *hard wired*--and to be compatible with *legacy* programs (software), the HDD will pretend (emulate) to use 512-byte formatting, but really that is being *overlaid* on the underlying 4096 (4K) functionality of the HDD hardware.  And that *emulation* function is where you can take a *hit* on performance?

So, if you do not purchase a HDD with *Advanced Format Technology*, then the discussion becomes mute?  Everything will function in the old style 512-byte technology?

But, it looks like you can use newer formatting tools (software) like *Boot It, Bare Metal* (BIBM), to *align* one's data on a non-*Advanced Format Technology* HDDs--does that make any sense to consider?

Quote:

Here's a couple links I have saved regarding this (these?) issues:

Ghost 2003 strategy for Windows 7    

Christer wrote on Feb 11^th, 2010 at 3:34pm:


And Brian replied:

Brian wrote on Feb 11^th, 2010 at 4:03pm:

Ghost 2003 is a pre-Vista and Win7 version of Ghost--so it is only *aware* of the old way of creating a Master Boot region--i.e. the first 63 sectors--or what is called the first *cylinder head*.  With the advent of Vista and Win7, it looks like the Master Boot region is now set to the first 1 MiB (2048 sectors?) if you use the partitioning tool that comes with the installation disk (DiskPart), and this sets the necessary *alignment* that allows the software to use the 4096-byte (4 KiB) physical sectors that match the new *Advanced Format Technology* harddrive hardware.

Here are a couple links with interesting information about all this:

http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/advice.html  

See the *Partition Alignment Issues* section.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Disk_Manager 

See the *Compatibility problems* section with the *Compatibility problems with using a 1-MiB alignment boundary* and *Advantages of using a 1-MiB alignment boundary* sub-sections.

The other main issue besides *alignment* that using WinXP to pre-partition the HDD was to avoid having the default Win7 behavior of creating the SRP (System Reserve Partition) that has the boot information separated from the OS partition and is necessary for the the BitLocker encryption software only available on Win7 enterprise(?) or profession version--most of us do not have that version in hand!

Windows 7 and SRP    

So, if you are going to use the new technology HDDs that have *Advanced Format Technology*, then the default Ghost 2003 imaging will not restore the proper alignment if restoring to a new replacement HDD.  It probably will work if the HDD is formatted with the Win7 partitioning tool and you are restoring to that existing partition where Ghost 2003 does not have to create the partition prior to restoring.

How to Prevent Windows 7 from Creating a Hidden /Recovery /System Reserved Partition during Installation


An alternate way to use Ghost 2003 would be to *force* a sector by sector image of the HDD.  This would presumably restore the *exact* same layout to a new HDD--but, testing would have to be done to be sure!  This would have to be a *whole HDD* image, and it will be a large image size--even with compression, because all data as well as the *blank space* will be included in the final image--you won't be able to ignore hibernation or page file used space like in the default running of Ghost 2003's back up image.


 

I want to condition this discussion with a few caveats with respect to the referenced Hitachi tech brief.

First, keep in mind that how the term "aligned" is used depends on what you're using as a reference point.   Readers of Hitachi's tech brief might get confused by our previous discussions of "MB-aligned" vs "CHS-aligned" partitions, but that's not the kind of alignment Hitachi is concerned with here.  Hitachi is talking about how the old 512-byte sectors and new 4KB sectors line up with each other.

It should also go without saying, but let's be clear that we are not talking about *moving* any 512-byte sectors so they line up better, we're talking about choosing *which* 512-byte sectors to use (and which to leave idle) so the ones we use are used more efficiently.

And lastly, my understanding is this whole matter only concerns disks up to 2TB in size--IOW, new drives that can be manufactured with sectors internally 4KB in size but can pretend to the outside world as though they have 512-byte sectors.  The registers in the ATAPI spec restrict the maximum number of sectors it can work with, which corresponds to 2TB if you use 512-byte sectors.  A disk might have 4KB sectors comprising more than 2TB, but if you make those 4KB sectors emulate 512-byte sectors (512e) that doesn't increase the number of them you can use with a legacy BIOS, MBR, partition table or OS, so you're still limited to 2TB that you can use.  I might be wrong, but I don't think 512e applies to drives >2TB.

Even though the manufacturers are using new technology inside, there's a backward compatibility purpose to still look like the old technology from the outside, hence 512e.  While the newest OSs like Win7 can use disks larger than 2TB, I don't believe they're doing so through 512e, I think they're accessing those disks as 4KB sectors natively, sans emulation.  That's why I think you can only use the largest drives with the newest OSs--the older OSs don't have the disk drivers to understand 4KB sectors.  They can understand 512/512e but not 4KB.  Win7 understands all of those.

Now, this whole alignment issue, in the context Microsoft and Hitachi are talking about, has to do with how to make disk read/writes more efficient.  It's not about whether a particular OS will work or not--it will work (assuming 512e), but disk access might not be as efficient as it could be.

To understand the problem, consider a utility like my MBRsaver.com.  It can save a backup of LBA 0 (your MBR sector), from which you can later restore *just a portion* of the MBR.  For example, you can restore just the boot code or just the DiskID without overwriting your partition table.  There are times when that might be desirable.

However, in order to do that it can't just retrieve the backup and slap it back onto Sector 0 or you'd overwrite the partition table, too--which you might not want to do.  Furthermore, you can't write just the 4 bytes of the DiskID to the drive because the drive can only write whole sectors at a time.  Thus, my utility has to first read the existing contents of the full sector into a buffer, then patch in the DiskID from the backup, then write the entire buffer back to disk--boot code, DiskID, partition table, and all.

That's the same kind of problem AF faces.  Since AF technology reads/writes a whole 4KB sector at a time, you have to use a similar technique to rewrite a single 512-byte "emulated sector".  The drive has to read the entire 4KB sector, change just the one-eighth of it representing the one 512-byte emulated sector, and write back the entire 4KB.  See the brief, page 2: "512-byte Write (Read-Modify-Write)".  Contrast that with a legacy drive, in which data could be read/written 512 bytes at a time.

Okay, there's not much the drive manufacturer can do about that.  If you're going to emulate 512-byte sectors and write one at a time, that's what you're going to have to do.

However, modern OS's don't read/write one sector at a time.  They write multi-sector blocks or clusters at a time.  That's what Hitachi is pointing out at the bottom of page 2 of the brief.  Same problem as above, just at the file system level now.  IOW, to change just one small part of a file, the file system (NTFS or FAT32) is rewriting all 8 sectors of that cluster, not just the one 512-byte sector that changed.  So the fact AF drives can't write one 512e sector at a time isn't really much of a problem because the file system you're likely using isn't writing one at a time, it's writing 8 at a time.  What we want to avoid, though, is making the drive read-modify-write *two* 4KB sectors instead of one, just to rewrite a single cluster.  That's the example in Figure 6 on page 3.

That brings us to page 3 of the brief, "Partition Alignment".  More specifically, it's cluster alignment we're really after, but in NTFS partitions the clusters will line up right if the partition boundaries, in 512e terms, line up on the boundaries of the drive's internal 4KB sectors.  That's the kind of alignment (or misalignment) Hitachi is talking about here.  As Hitachi notes on page 3, partitions will be properly aligned if you create them with Vista or Win7, but not with XP.

FTR, it's worth noting that *NTFS* clusters will align if the partition boundaries are aligned, but that's not true if you format the partition FAT32.  You can align a FAT32 partition's boundaries but that doesn't mean the clusters will necessarily line up correctly.  That's the purpose behind BIBM's "Align for NTFS conversion" option (see Brian's link in Reply #1).

NightOwl,

I read the pages you linked to and they confirm a lot of the information that I have found. Dan has already answered your questions better than I would have so, I'll just add that re-reading the old thread "Ghost 2003 strategy for Windows 7", especially post #35 juggled my memory. The "-fdsp switch" is the key to successfully restoring an image to the original source partition or to the original source disk. (I never got around to trying the BCDEdit route.) Pre-partitioning is the key to avoiding the SRP partition.

Dan,
I'm equally impressed by your answers, thanks!

Quote:

This convinces me that Ghost 2003 will work with the new AF drives. The situation with the "-fdsp switch" has meant that restoring to a new hard disk, would include pre-partitioning and installing Windows 7 prior to restoring the image. That way the disk will get its signature and the "-fdsp switch" makes sure that it does not get altered/deleted in the restore procedure.

The difference with the new AF hard disks is that I can no longer use Windows XP to pre-partition but any of the alternatives listed by you.

Quote:

As I understand Brians instructions in Reply #2,

Quote:

that procedure will create an "aligned partition" and avoid the SRP-partition.

There's no need for creating all partitions, leaving no unallocated space, to avoid the SRP-partition, right?

Christer wrote on Jan 29^th, 2012 at 5:58pm:

The "installing Windows 7" step seems unnecessarily excessive.  It sounds like the only reason you're doing that is to generate a DiskID.  If all you need is some random DiskID, you can manually type something in with a sector editor like Diskedit or Roadkil's Sector Editor.  Or if you want to restore the same DiskID as on the original source disk, there are a number of ways to do that.  (Did I mention my MBRsaver tool can do that?     That would be a whole lot quicker and easier than installing Win7 just to turn around and overwrite it.)

Also, IME Ghost 2003 doesn't overwrite the DiskID if you do a partition restore vs a disk restore.  I never do disk restores, and never use the -fdsp switch.

Christer wrote on Jan 29^th, 2012 at 5:58pm:


Christer, that sounds time consuming. I just ran this test.

Win7 in a MB aligned partition. BIBM was on the HD too but I don't think it interfered with the result.

I generalized the BCD with...

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot      
bcdedit /set {default} device boot         
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot      
bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot      

A Ghost 2003 partition image of Win7 was created.
The image was restored to unallocated space on an unpartitioned HD. A target partition size was chosen in Ghost. (the HD had been used before so it had a MBR)

Win7 on the new HD booted normally. Easy. No switches used.

Edit.... The above partition was cylinder aligned. I deleted the partition and created a MB aligned partition with BIBM. The same Win7 image was restored into this partition. Win7 booted and the partition remained MB aligned.