Upgrading a 512 byte cluster drive ?

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I work on a Dell PC with a 10g 5400 Maxtor drive setup by Dell with 512
byte clusters
and Win NT 4.0. The drive has got terribly fragmented and I want to
upgrade it anyway
to a 60g or 80g 7200 8gb Maxtor drive. Mostly I just want to speed it
up.
I don't need more space. I don't know if the size will cause me trouble
also.

Here's my question:
Would the Maxtor setup disk ?Maxblast? allow say 4k clusters on the new
drive and fill the clusters with 8 contiguous 512 byte clusters, or
would it just give me
4k clusters only filled with 512 bytes each when I do the copy/upgrade.
?


Thanks for any info
 
You need an OS partition under 4GB for NT to boot.

I take the volume is NTFS. There are no free tools to copy this. Ghost and DI
will not change cluster size. Backup/restore is the only way I know of.

I suggest you create a 4GB NTFS volume on the new drive with NT4, which gives
you 4KB clusters. Then make the new drive master, boot the NT CD, and
reinstall from scratch.

Upgrade memory to 64MB first if you have less. This will dramatically decrease
disk I/O.

| I work on a Dell PC with a 10g 5400 Maxtor drive setup by Dell with 512
| byte clusters
| and Win NT 4.0. The drive has got terribly fragmented and I want to
| upgrade it anyway
| to a 60g or 80g 7200 8gb Maxtor drive. Mostly I just want to speed it
| up.
| I don't need more space. I don't know if the size will cause me trouble
| also.
|
| Here's my question:
| Would the Maxtor setup disk ?Maxblast? allow say 4k clusters on the new
| drive and fill the clusters with 8 contiguous 512 byte clusters, or
| would it just give me
| 4k clusters only filled with 512 bytes each when I do the copy/upgrade.
| ?
 
Eric said:
You need an OS partition under 4GB for NT to boot.

I take the volume is NTFS. There are no free tools to copy this. Ghost and DI
will not change cluster size. Backup/restore is the only way I know of.

I suggest you create a 4GB NTFS volume on the new drive with NT4, which gives
you 4KB clusters. Then make the new drive master, boot the NT CD, and
reinstall from scratch.

Upgrade memory to 64MB first if you have less. This will dramatically decrease
disk I/O.
Click to expand...

It has only one 10g NTFS partition setup with 512 byte clusters as reported by
chkdsk,
and uses NT 4.0 Workstation OS. That might be true for NT 3.* though ??

The free utility to copy that I was wondering about is:
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/maxblast3.htm
It has formating, partition, and copy functions for upgrading drives.
Most HD websites have these free utilities.

What I was wondering about is if I create 4k clusters on the new drive,
will it fill it with 8 contigious 512 byte clusters, or will it just put 512 bytes

in each 4k cluster ? I would guess the only way to know would be to try it
and see if the used space increases by approx a factor of 8. It currently
has 5g used, 5g free space. That would take ~ 40g IF it does this.

The memory will be upgraded for sure along with the hard drive.

A copy would just save many, many hours of program installation and digging
up drivers etc.. and I get a 'slow' backup drive with the old drive. I agree a
backup/restore
may be the only way, but I was just wondering if anyone had tried to
upgrade to a bigger cluster size with these utilities.

Thanks.
 
Eric said:
You need an OS partition under 4GB for NT to boot.

I take the volume is NTFS. There are no free tools to copy this.
Ghost and DI will not change cluster size. Backup/restore is the only
way I know of.
Click to expand...

The tools included with a new maxtor drive will resize clusters as part of a
drive copy.

laters,
Raul.
 
I take the volume is NTFS. There are no free tools to copy this. Ghost and
DI
will not change cluster size. Backup/restore is the only way I know of.
Click to expand...

PM8 manual suggests cluster size can be changed on FAT/FAT32 and NTFS (page
66)
 
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