Will BING/BIBM have problems with an AF aligned drive?

[ohaya]

Hi,

I asked about some general info about advanced format/AF drives and Alignment in the Technology forum. However, I do have a question relative to BING (and maybe BIBM).

I already backed up a partition from the 1.5TB drive that contains a bunch of BING images, and am now in the process of running Toshiba's PAT tool on the 1.5TB drive. That drive has only one NTFS partition taking up the entire drive.

It's taking awhile, but in the meantime, I'm wondering if, after the 1.5TB drive alignment has been completed using the PAT tool, will that drive/partition continue to play nicely with BING (and with BIBM)?

Just wondering...

Thanks,
Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

DARN!! I knew that things were going too well ..

When I rebooted the system, BING gave me a popup error saying something about overlapping partitions and asking if I wanted BING to correct that. There was only an OK button, so I clicked that.

Then, in Partition Works, it still sees the drive, but is now showing TWO partitions, both the same size, and both have an funny looking "E" next to the names. One is the original name "Canvio" and the other is "MBR Entry 0". I clicked to View MBR and it's showing only one partition, the "Canvio" one.

What to do? I'm thinking I should delete the "MBR Entry 0", but am worried that BING will delete both partitions (the real "Canvio" one, and the "MBR Entry 0" one)???

Jim

P.S. I have an EMBR on this drive (i.e., the Undo EMBR button is available).

P.P.S. I saw in one of the threads that TB doesn't support BING anymore? Is that really true? What does that mean? I'd had to abandon using BING, which I've known and loved (to use) for YEARS!

[ohaya]

Hi,

Sorry. I shouldn't have, but I'm stuck, so I clicked Undo EMBR, and now when I do View MBR, it shows TWO entries!!

One (MBR Entry 1) is slightly smaller than the other (Canvio). I'm guessing that the smaller one is the "correct" partition and I should remove the other ("Canvio") one?

I'll wait to hear back for awhile, but like I said, I'm kind of stuck at BING now...

Jim

[ohaya]

MBR is now showing:
STARTING ENDING
C H S FS C H S LBA Sectors
CANVIO-0 0 65 2 7h 1023 68 3 4096 2930272256
MBR ENTRY 1 0 1 1 7h 1023 254 63 63 2930272002

Please advise.

Thanks,
Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

I noticed that in BING, I could do Edit files on one of the partitions (CANVIO-0), and see my directories and files, but when I tried on the other partiton, BING would say it couldn't mount, so I decided to just delete the MBR ENTRY 1 partition in partition work. After that the "E" disappeared, and I think is ok.

I'm about to run Tool again, just to see if it thinks the partition is still aligned, but won't do an align again for now at least..

Jim

[ohaya]

Hi,

PAT reported that the partition is still aligned! So, things seem to be ok now??

I think that the mistake I made is that there was an EMBR on the Toshiba drive when I ran PAT, and I probably should have removed the EMBR (Undo EMBR) before running PAT.

Is that correct?

Jim

[Brian K]

Jim,

Use BING to do your aligning. Or better still, BIBM. Not PAT.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=546

[ohaya]

Brian,

That partition that was on there WAS created by BING. When I got the drive, I used BING to remove the original partition, then created a new one, then formatted in Windows (NTFS).

Apparently, PAT thought that partition was not aligned, plus as I said, I saw a rather significant improvement in the drive performance after I ran PAT.

Jim

[ohaya]

P.S. I'd seen that KB article earlier. Also, I don't have BIBM yet.

Jim

[TeraByte Support(PP)]

Whenever you make partitioning changes on an EMBR drive and the program used doesn't support them you risk data loss. In your case, it looks like it just changed the partition's position a bit. This then didn't match the partition in the EMBR and you ended up with two using the same space -- one valid and one not (the "E" indicates an error exists).

It's best to convert to MBR before making those types of changes or align using BING/BIBM.

The partition being aligned or not shouldn't be any problem for BING/BIBM. They should work with it just fine.