Dell Precision M6800 (Late 2013) - Manual (Page 37)

Dell Latitude Ultrabook, E-Family & Mobile Precision Reimage “How-To” Guide
3.3 Other Partition Alignment Requirements
Environment Action
IRRT / RAID 0,1 & 5 Configuration Use Alignment Tools (1) to ensure Advanced Format drive
partitions are properly aligned
Data Protection / Encryption Use Alignment Tools (1) to ensure Advanced Format drive
partitions are properly aligned before encrypting the drive.
Note: Misaligned encrypted Advanced Format drives need
to be decrypted, then aligned and re-encrypted

(1) Please refer to the Partition Alignment Tools - Section 3.4
3.4 Partition Alignment Options
Partition alignment is required for older operating systems and is recommended for new operating
systems in order to insure proper hard drive performance and imaging between drives of differing
sector sizes. An aligned partition is when the starting offset of the partition is divisible by 4096 Bytes
or by 8 for logical block addressing (LBA) numbers.
3.4.1 Pre-Installation of Operating System
This section lists a few options for partition alignment pre-installation of OS:
- Using Ghost:
Ghost 11.5 will maintain the alignment state of the Gold/Master image. If the disk image is
built and aligned on a 512e/Advanced Format drive, the clones of that image will remain
aligned. If the image is built on a 512B, Ghost command line switch {-align=1MB} can be
used to ensure alignment when deployed to any drive.
- Using DISKPART: