Installing "Windows 7" on an "Advanced Format HDD", anything I have to consider?

If you install Windows, you can launch diskpart from Windows and check the offset. Just open the Command Prompt and type in the following commands:

diskpart
select disk 0
list par

If you see an offset that is not divisible by 4, then it's misaligned. Typical values for the offset are 31KB (misaligned) or 1024KB (aligned).

 

Perfect.

Can you confirm this would also do the trick?

 

That's equivalent, except you would need a calculator.

 

Well, the offset has to be divisible by 4 KB which is 4096 Bytes, so any amount in KB that can be divided by 4 is aligned and any offset in MB will be aligned (1 MB = 1024 KB), always be wary of the units used.

 

Thanks for the replies, friends.

I asked about the alternative method because as I was googling the subject, I found:

... whilst apparently, msinfo32 does not.

Correct?

 

True, but since Windows 7 won't do something like offset the first partition by 1023.5KB, checking alignment doesn't require that much precision.

Using diskpart has the benefit of letting you create partitions and checking the offset within the same program. Besides, msinfo32 isn't available in WinPE.

 

Just a short note to say that this morning I installed Windows 7 and my drive was (luckily) aligned correctly. I actually used diskpart via shift+f10 before installation started to clean and 1024-align the drive.

After installing the Dell drivers, I installed SP1 via the .exe downloaded from microsoft.com and that also went smoothly

Thanks a lot to those who replied in this thread, very much appreciated.

 

Great, that's good to hear.

 

If you install Windows to a brand new drive or format the drive before installing, it will be aligned. The Windows installer will take care of it, the greatest risk of getting an unaligned install is by cloning.