LANDESK and Advanced Format disks

Applies to LANDESK Management Suite and LANDESK Management Suite 9.0 and 9.5

Description

Recently many companies have decided to transition hard drives to an Advanced Format. This generally means that they are using a sector size of 4k instead of 512 bytes. The primary goal is to improve disk performance.

Problem

In order to use and work with the Advanced Format drives, an Operating System and anything that interacts with a disk at a low level must be "Advanced Format Aware." The following Microsoft OSes are known to be "Advanced Format Aware"

• Microsoft Windows Vista® SP1
• Microsoft Windows 7®
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008®
• Microsoft Windows PE 2.1 (built from Vista SP1 code)
• Microsoft Windows PE 3.x (built from Windows 7 code)

Other earlier versions of Windows, including Windows XP® and Windows Server 2003® are not "Advanced Format Aware." This means that if they are installed on an Advanced Format drive, they must follow some special steps to ensure that the alignment is correct and to prevent performance degredation. This does not mean that Windows XP cannot be installed on an Advanced Format drive, just that the disk must be set up properly to avoid a performance hit when using Windows XP.

How it can happen

One way a machine can get to a problem state is to use Windows Vista (or newer) or Windows PE 2.1 (or newer) to partition a disk, and then install Windows XP manually, as a scripted install, or using an ImageX image. Because WinPE 2.1 is "Advanced Format Aware" by default, the disk is not aligned such that Windows XP can run correctly.

Resolution

There are a few ways to resolve or avoid this issue. Because Windows XP cannot be updated to handle Advanced Format drives, problems will only be on machines that use Windows XP. Newer OSes should be updated as needed to support the Advanced Format drives and they will function correctly.

Updates

See the following article from Microsoft about updates for Advanced Format drives:

An update that improves the compatibility of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Advanced Format Disks is available

ImageW

ImageW v2 works with Advanced Format drives. Because ImageW is a sector-based imaging tool, the alignment and partitions are contained in the image file. If an image was captured from a machine where the disk alignment was correct, any images deployed will have the correct alignment as well. This applies regardless of if the image was captured from, or deployed to, an Advanced Format drive or not.

Important Note: LANDESK strongly recommends that only ImageW 2.x be used for all ImageW tasks. ImageW 1.x should NOT be used. Any remaining .img files (ImageW 1.x) should be migrated to ImageW if possible by deploying with ImageW 1.x and re-capturing with ImageW 2.x.

ImageX and Ghost

ImageX® and Ghost® are both file-based imaging tools. This means they capture files only, not disk information. During deployment, they restore files to and existing volume. These tools need to have the disk partitions already created in order deploy the image correctly. That means they depend on the alignment being correct before the image is applied. For more information about file-based vs. sector-based imaging and ImageX, see Using ImageX with LANDESK.

There are a few options to resolve or avoid issues with Windows XP and Advanced Format drives. They are outlined in this article from Microsoft:

You cannot install Windows XP successfully after you use Windows Vista or Windows PE 2.0 to create partitions on a hard disk

Basically, the options are:

• Disable "automatic disk translation" feature in BIOS. It can be changed from "Auto" to "Large"
• Set several registry keys in WinPE 2.1 before partitioning the disk

The best option when deploying OSes with LANDESK is to set the registry keys before partitioning the disk.

OSD

When using the OSD tool, the registry keys will need to be added before any diskpart commands. The first diskpart command is usually the first command run in WinPE. It looks something like:

REMEXEC18=diskpart /s X:\LDClient\rmvol.txt

Commands will need to be manually added to the script before this command to set the proper registry keys. This can be done in the Advanced Edit of the script. Please see Advanced edit of OSD scripts for information on editing OSD scripts.

Provisioning

In LANDESK Provisioning, the action that runs diskpart is the Partition action. There are several possible actions and steps that can be run as a Partition action in order to perform all the steps necessary to prepare the disk. The Partition action will automatically add the registry keys needed before running any diskpart commands.

In order for the Partition action to set the registry keys correctly, the Provisioning Template MUST have the correct Target OS set. It will only apply when the Target OS is set to an OS that is not "Advanced Format Aware" (e.g. Windows XP Pro) It will NOT add the necessary registry keys if the Target OS is just set to Windows.

Important Note: These registry keys should ONLY be set when deploying Windows XP from WinPE 2 or greater. They should not be set when deploying an "Advanced Format Aware" operating system.

More Information

For more information about Advanced Format drives please see the following external articles. This list is by no means exhaustive.

Understanding the Impact of Large Sector Media for IT Pros

Information about Microsoft support policy for large sector drives in Windows