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Many hard disk drive manufacturers supply their modern drives with controllers that can shift
addressing offset to one sector (63 sector becomes 64 sector), so volumes will appear aligned.
How to work with 4-KB sector size disks using Acronis Disk Director
Suppose that you added a new 4-KB sector size hard disk drive with to a machine that is running
Windows XP only. There are no volumes on this drive yet. If you start creating volumes on this disk
using Windows XP, you may experience some slowdown of the system performance while accessing
the disk. To ensure proper volume alignment and normal access to volumes on this disk, perform the
following steps:
1. Create a bootable media with Acronis Disk Director—see How to create bootable media (p. 64).
2. Run Acronis Disk Director from a bootable media—see Running Acronis Disk Director.
3. Select the Bootable media OS disk layout—see Disk layout (p. 25).
4. Create volumes—see Creating a volume (p. 35).
If Windows 7 or Windows Vista is installed in addition to Windows XP, select the disk layout of either
of those operating systems.
After the volumes are created, you can perform other operations with them (including changing their
size) under any disk layout.
How to fix volume misalignment using Acronis Disk Director
Suppose that you have already created basic volumes on a disk with a 4-KB sector size, using
Windows XP. Volumes already contain data. To align the misaligned volumes on the disk using
Acronis Disk Director, clone this disk to another and then clone it back—see Disk cloning (p. 55). After
cloning, Acronis Disk Director shifts the first volume start with 1MB offset, all the disk volumes will be
aligned properly.
