DD sees raid 5 array as three disks

[micron98]

Hi,

One of nForce 430 SATA port went bad when I was using it with 0+1 configuration. So I backed up everything and converted it to three disks raid5 and tried to prepare it before restoring old OS and DATA.

When I boot with DD CD, it sees 3 separate disks rather than 1 raid5 volume. Basically, DD was no use for me as I could not prepare any partition on it. So I used BartPE to prepare the disk and restored everything back to new raid5 volume.

After successful restoration, I rebooted and used DD to resize cluster size to 64K from 4K because I found 64K cluster size gave me 100+ MB / s write speed on my nForece 430 chipset, a huge improvement from 20MB/s.

DD successfully changed the cluster size but ??? my disk partition alignment was off. I gave it 2048 hidden sectors and it was changed to 88.

Why is DD changing partition starting offset when I only told it to change cluster size ???

My computer is now too slow... because of poor write speed.

Can anyone give me a help on how I can change my partitions from 4K clusters to 64K clusters without affecting partition starting offset?

Thanks,
Sam

[MudCrab]

DD will often change the starting offset of a partition when changes like that are made. Also, DD doesn't give you the ability to fine-tune the offset. If you must have the 2048 offset, you'll probably need to use a different program. If you want to reset back to the standard pre-Vista offset, you can image the partition with TI (if you have TI) and then restore it and it will be realigned.

Are you sure the offset changed only when you resized the clusters? It's possible doing the restore changed the offset. What imaging software are you using?

[micron98]

Thanks for the Reply MudCrab,

I am using ImageX by MS to capture and restore disk contents so it does not alter the partition in any way.

My friend had used TI couple of weeks ago when he was trying to restore his image onto aligned ( offset at 128K ) SSD and he said TI changed starting offset as well.

[Acronis Support]

Hello micron98 and MudCrab,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/)

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

-{ Quote: "My friend had used TI couple of weeks ago when he was trying to restore his image onto aligned ( offset at 128K ) SSD and he said TI changed starting offset as well." }-

That's because our software have to completely rebuild partition structure (on the space necessary for recovery) in order to restore the image.

Thank you.
--
Alexander Nikolsky