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scraby

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win 7 disk software mirror error "all disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size"

i have a win7-64 pro with the os on a 2 tb spinning drive.  i added another 2 tb drive.  they are not identical but are bot seagate and all the info about them is identical (see attached pics).  when i try to mirror the boot drive i get the following:

"all disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector sieze must be valid"

i've searched the web and have found posts about this but no solution.  drives are set to dynamic and mirror option is available but results in this error when selected.

any experts have any experience with this?

thanks in advance for you time.
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scraby

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sorry forgot the attachments
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Capture1.JPG
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Steven Harris
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There could be a difference in sectors that causes the issue.
Hi.  Since your screen shots indicate disk1 is unallocated, this usually means you're missing some formatting info hat Windows is looking for on that drive.  Have you tried launching disk manager as you have in the second shot, and right-clicking on the unallocated drive?  This should give you the option to make "new simple volume".
Most default answers are probably good.  You may want to match the the parameters of disk 0 if setting up RAID.  Please let us know how it goes.  Good formatting!!
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Nothing you can do about it. You have a 512 byte sectored drive and a 4KB sectored (advanced format drive).  You can NOT mirror them.

(The drives are NOT identical, BTW, sector size is a huge deal.  There is more to a drive than the capacity and interface)
.. besides, even if you could do this, you probably wouldn't want to.  AF drives always do a minimum of 4KB for every I/O.  Even if you change just one byte in a file, then absolute minimum amount of data that would have to be moved is 16KB AFTER the data has been read in RAM,changed, and files are opened, and pointers everywhere have been read in and still in cache.

Advanced format drives look great on throughput benchmarks, but are not a good choice for O/S drives in real-world situations.  

Go find a 512-byte sectored drive, and use this 4KB drive as an external backup drive.
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thinkspacesolutions, i partitioned the 2nd drive and used drive letter y: to be able to use the fsutil command: here is what i got

C:\Users\st>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:
NTFS Volume Serial Number :       0xcaa4a043a4a0343b
Version :                         3.1
Number Sectors :                  0x00000000e8e077ff
Total Clusters :                  0x000000001d1c0eff
Free Clusters  :                  0x000000000c178332
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000000780
Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Cluster :               4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length :           0x0000000016880000
Mft Start Lcn  :                  0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn :                  0x000000000df1c6ff
Mft Zone Start :                  0x00000000050c6dc0
Mft Zone End   :                  0x00000000050d35e0
RM Identifier:        9F70035C-F595-11E2-80CD-001E4FDFC528

and for the second drive

C:\Users\st>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo y:
NTFS Volume Serial Number :       0xbaaa2496aa2450e5
Version :                         3.1
Number Sectors :                  0x00000000e8e077ff
Total Clusters :                  0x000000001d1c0eff
Free Clusters  :                  0x000000001d1b7f0d
Total Reserved :                  0x0000000000000000
Bytes Per Sector  :               512
Bytes Per Cluster :               4096
Bytes Per FileRecord Segment    : 1024
Clusters Per FileRecord Segment : 0
Mft Valid Data Length :           0x0000000000040000
Mft Start Lcn  :                  0x00000000000c0000
Mft2 Start Lcn :                  0x0000000000000002
Mft Zone Start :                  0x00000000000c0000
Mft Zone End   :                  0x00000000000cc820
RM Identifier:        BCC912FE-3667-11E3-BACA-001E4FDFC528
Try the mirror now...
What you have done is a horrible hack, is unstable, a big performance hit, and is NOT supported by MSFT.  You have high risk of data loss in event of a drive failure.
dlethe, if this was a brand new drive, then what it was seeing was a raw unpartitioned drive trying to mirror a partitioned drive, which is not possible.

If this was an AF'd drive, it would have shown with the fsutil as 4096 bytes per sector.
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well, i don't think you can add a mirror with a drive that is partitioned already which is why  i believe chris_top_he_r to be incorrect.

see attached and notice grayed out mirror option since 2nd drive is partitioned
Untitled.png
AF drives can be programmed to emulate 512 byte drives by flipping a bit, and some have jumper.  Code can be run to do this. (Heck, I write such code)

But while this can be done, and MSFT "fooled", it just isn't stable in a mirroring situation.  That is why I did not suggest it.   Deleting the partitioning is nothing more than placing zeros in the first 512 bytes of the HDD.  Abandon the effort.  The partitioning isn't the problem.
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dlethe, i have read about af drives when i was researching this problem but at that low of a level is beyond my knowledge.  how do you know i have a af drive as i don't see any indication of this in my posts or attachments

when i purchase a drive, is there somewhere that will tell me it's an af drive or not?  is the only difference the 512b to 4k sector size?  what is the purpose of af drives?

looking back i guess the only indicator of the sector size issue is when windows tells me it cannot proceed with the mirror because of this.  so how do i find out what my drive type is? preferably without removing the drive from the machine.

just wondering how come the fsutil command shows both drives to be pretty much identical?  is this at a higher level than the actual sectors on the platter that the drive accesses?
If you were to install the HDD out of a box and run fsutil, it would tell you if it was an AF drive by the the Bytes Per Sector: 4096
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so i can change bytes per sector when i partition using the allocation unit size drop down?  

i removed the partition and wanted to run the fsutil command to check so see what it would report but could not figure out how to tell it what drive to report on.  my only choices are volume pathname or drive letter.

i'm a bit confused now, so my problem is my first drive maybe a 512b / sector and the second drive is 4096 which is advanced format.  these sector sizes are hard coded in the drive and are not modifiable in disk management yet i can partition and store data on this af drive without any issues but i cannot mirror the two?

any ideas on where to go from here.  dlethe, do i just need to buy a 2tb 512b/sec drive?  is this info readily available during drive purchase (i have not noticed this before)?
What are the HDD model numbers?
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without opening the case (it's kinda burried behind a few other boxes) the only info that i have is what i posted in the initial pictures from what windows reports in device manager.  will this suffice or if not i can pull it out and see what drives say on them.
I was able to find them.

According to Seagate:

The new drive is a Seagate Barracuda XT 8/4 with 512 bytes per sector.

The XT is the RAID addition, which in theory has better RAID support, but they are basically the same drive. See the attachment.

Out of the two, the c:\ is the best one running 2 - 1TB platters, while the XT runs 4 - 500GB platters.
barracuda-xt-ds1696.3-1102us.pdf
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thanks guys, i'm going to purchase two 512b drives at the same time and see how this works out.