Powerful Partition Alignment Tool to Align Partition Perfectly

What is partition alignment?

Partition alignment refers to the physical sector offset of partitions. This is done to make more efficient use of the physical space on hard drives, and it can optimize the performance of inputting and outputting data. Microsoft engineers have explained again-&-again that disk alignment can improves performance by not merely the nominal 10 – 15% in RAID systems, but commonly 20%, 30%, or more. Thus, it is able to provide a significant increase in system performance.

Why do you need to align partition?

As we all know, Windows built-in disk management can only the do the basic operations with partitions, like create and format. Although some advanced Windows OS have more features, it still can’t reach some partition operations.

As it mentioned above, partition alignment can improve the performance. Unfortunately, the disk management in all Windows OS can not align partitions. What a pity! However, the Diskpart.exe can check out whether the partition has been aligned perfectly or not.

Powerful partition alignment tool to align partition perfecly

Generally speaking, the offset number must be on a multiple of 1024KB. Since Windows built-in partition management can not achieve this goal, it’s time to find disk partition software to get rid of this bad situation.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro Edition is a powerful partition alignment tool to perfectly align partitions. You have several choices to align your partitions. Please see the pictures below:

                                                                                                               Partition Alignment

It is acknowledged that 1KB is equal to 2 sectors, so you’d better chose 2048sector, for the disk offset number must be 1024KB. After your choice, please click “Apply” in the toolbar to commit the task. If you don’t choose any selection, this tool will default “Optimized” for your partition, which can best optimize the operating system.

If you want to see the detailed procedures by this partition software, please see the article of align partition step by step.

Magic VMware Partition Manager to Perfect VMware

Do you know what VMware is? Have you used it before? What do you think of it? So many questions I want to ask you about if you know it. On the contrary, there maybe a lot of people still don’t know what it means, because they don’t have relationship with it. No matter you have relation to it or not, some useful information can widen your knowledge, especially for the computer users.

About VMware

VM, which stands for “Virtual Machine”, is a widely-installed operating system for compatible computers and Servers. It makes each operating system behaves as if it were installed on a self-contained computer with its own set of programs and hardware resources.

With the increasing of computer, VMware has been widely used in computer to help computer administrators. It provides a completely virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system. What it does is to ensure the host system safety or normal, because all the operations in VMware will not be changed. To some extent, it is more like a tester.

Magic VMware partition manager to perfect VM

VMware has closely relationship with the real computer operating system, except the influence on each OS. With the virtual machine, it can add or remove the number of hard disks, increase the memory, upgrade the machine, etc. However, these operations can just be finished outside. In other words, when the system in VMware is rebooting, these operations cannot be accessible, which will bring you so much inconvenient.

In order to break up the limitation, the VMware partition manager is needed for you. It is free and easy to use. What the most important is that it works on circumstance of virtual machine, which is not supported in other partition tools. With this magic tool, you can do the basic and advanced operations, like resize/move/split/create/hide/wipe partitions, extend partition, copy partition/disk, etc.

To sum up, VMware has brought so much convenient for us, and it gives the security for the real operating system to avoid some unnecessary troubles. Thus, in order to make it more efficient, a partition magic is necessary. Do you think so?

How to Access GPT Protective Hard Disk Partition on Windows XP?

GPT hard disk cannot be accessed in Windows XP

A growing number of people want to follow the fashion, which does not only exist in filed of cloth, but also in computer. My friend Mary brought a hard disk, and she set the partition as GPT. When it is connected to computer and computer can’t read it. Mary’s computer is stalled with windows XP. She runs to me for help. I told her to download third party software to convert GPT disk to MBR disk. Only in this way does GPT disk can be useful to her computer installed with win XP. To let more people know that and I published this article on purpose. GPT actually is more advantages over MBR disk, but under some conditions, it is not useful to all windows. Firstly, we must clarify some definitions.

About GPT and MBR hard disk

GPT hard disk is one kind of disk style. In computer hardware, GPT is a standard for the layout of partition table on a physical hard drive. It breaks up the limitation of four primary partitions, and it supports the number of partitions up to 128 per disk. However, 32-bit version of Windows XP will see only the Protective MBR and the EE partition will not be mounted.

MBR disk is another kind of hard disk. As we all know, the original method of partitioning disks refers to MBR.  Although it has been widely accepted, this scheme has many shortcomings including partitions being limited to 2TB in size. Another shortcoming is the limitation of 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition.

What is GPT Protective Partition?

As mentioned above, GPT hard disk is better than MBR in the storing aspects. Thus, so many computer users choose the type of GPT hard drive as their disks regardless of any defects. In this case, when they use the GPT disk, the hard drive seems to refuse to work, and it will show as GPT Protective Partition. That is really annoyed to users.

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Why does this phenomenon show up? The reason is that GPT only works on Windows 7/8/Vista/2008 and 64-bit version of Windows XP/2003, but 32-bit version of Windows XP/2003 are not acceptable. What a pity!

How to access GPT protective hard disk partition on Windows XP?

Since GPT is not permitted on 32-bit version of Windows XP, what we need is to convert GPT to MBR without losing data, but how can we achieve this goal? Generally speaking, we always try to ask built-in Disk Management for help, however, GPT disks can be converted to MBR disks with built-in Disk Management only if all existing partitioning is first deleted, with associated loss of data. Therefore, a third-party partition manager is quite needed.

Among these partition tools, AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro Edition enjoys a large popularity. It can deal with different kinds of partition problems, including the conversion between GPT and MBR disk. Meanwhile, this partition tool can also solve the problems of dynamic disk. When it works, all the data in the disk will be protected, and the clean interface gives an easy direction for users, even for a green hand.

Three-step procedures to finish converting from GPT to MBR

 Step 1: Download, install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant pro edition. It can be take conversion disk between MBR and GPT. You totally can convert it depends on what computer performance. The disk and partitions in computer will be detected by this software, and shown in the interface of software.

 Step 2: Right-click partition you want to delete, and select “Convert to MBR Disk” function in function bar.

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Step3: You can see the preview effect in the interface, but that’s preview effect. To save all changes, you don’t forget to click “Apply” button.

After you finish the steps above, you can open windows management and check your hard disk. It is very easy and safe to convert disk between MBR and GPT.