Paragon Alignment Tool - free until 30th June

IanAG

IanAG

IanAG

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Couldn't find this posted already which was surprising but this seems worthwhile.

Paragon Alignment Tool

Not much use for Win 7 I believe as it should be performed automatically, but this tool allows partition alignment to be performed even if Win XP is already in place.

Very useful with my Compaq Mini 311c and C300 64GB which arrived today, as there is no OS media included had to setup via images. It was quick after restoring the image anyway but according to ATTO benchmarks it has given some pretty substantial improvements.

Hope this is of use to people.

Thanks
Ian
 
Good to know you can alter alignment with an installation in place. As got an old SSD in use, and Acronis messed up alignment. Didn't want to reinstall.
 
I tried using this on 2 drives, a 750GB sata and a 1.5TB sata. Took 6 hours for the progress bars to fill up, a further 12 hours until it "finished", both drives now show up as raw and the recovery programs i've tried so far cann't read a thing from either drive.

From my point of view, avoid like the plague.
 
Hmm, sounds like it can have problems then. As with anything like this backups are essential.

Worked fine when I ran it after restoring an acronis image but will think twice and ensure everything is backed up fully before using on a live system.
 
I had a go, why not...

Two 1TB drives were put through alignment.

Samsung F3 - single partition/main drive - had to reboot to get exclusive access - left it to align and went to bed, woke up 5 hours later and it was done. No problems.

WD Caviar Black - three partitions 20GB/31GB/880GB - 20GB/31GB aligned in minutes - 880GB partition attempts to align but fails with a red message next to it saying Not Aligned.

I suspect the 880GB partition can't be aligned because of an Acronis recovery wossit in there which is for the other drive. But I'm not sure. Nevertheless that is all that's in there so not sure what else can be blamed.

deadite66 said:
if the pc reboots the app that runs doesn't warn you about stopping will wipe your data so beware.
Click to expand...

Yes it does. It says that rebooting or shutting down the computer while it's running will **** things up. And it also says if you really want to stop the program you should press Esc or Ctrl + C.

I was watching that screen as I dozed off :p


Incidentally the white paper is an interesting read.
 
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Any idea what the best practice is for this on a system drive? I ran it, it wanted exclusive mode and rebooted into the util, I went afk for a few mins and when I came back it was in windows having made no alignment changes.
I assume this is either something to do with RAID support, or Win7 having separate boot and OS partitions (boot partition is aligned ok)

Working on making a BartPE boot CD with an MSI installer atm, should be able to run the app without rebooting then.

I should probably just do a clean install at some point, What i've got atm is an Acronis clone from when I was just running a single SSD. I used gParted to shift the partitions, but apparently the OS partition didn't align properly.
 
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