<div dir="ltr">Thanks to everyone on ALE for all their help.<div><br></div><div>I ended up buying a 500GB WD drive. I ran the 'WD Align' tool (which apparently a pared down version of an unknown Acronis program) with the new drive connected to a usb adapter, and it moved the beginning of the partition at 126,976, which is 4096 times 31. I'm not sure of exact significance of the this number, though, as this partition ends at about 403GB, but this tool shows it ends at position 846,544,895. I wish I knew what this tool is actually doing, so that I could format and clone the new drive myself in Gparted.<div>
<br></div><div>If anyone gets a new drive and you use a tool from the manufacturer that aligns your partitions (Seagate smartalign or WD Align), I'd recommend creating a very small partition at the start of the drive, use the tool to align the partition, and then resize with Gparted, since the end of the partition doesn't matter, imho (except when reading/writing data in the 4KB not aligned at the end of the partition). I imaged the drive with Acronis True Image and later ran the align tool, which took a few hours to move 120GB of data.</div>
<div><br></div><div style>Offtopic, but will there be an ALE branded ale? That would be cool.<br></div></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 1:04 PM, David Ritchie <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:deritchie@gmail.com" target="_blank">deritchie@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:08 AM, Justin Goldberg <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:justgold79@gmail.com" target="_blank">justgold79@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div><div class="im"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<p>Thanks for the info Matt and Ron.</p>
<p>Grrrrrr, planned obsolescence.</p>
<p>I guess fat32 wouldn't make any difference.</p></blockquote></div><div>Repeat after me: Windows XP is an obsolete, unsupported software system. Same can be said about a lot of previous versions of Linux versions,<br>
which would likely not work well with newer hardware either. Not so much 'planned obsolescence' as it is a moving target....<br>
<br>FAT32 would make no difference, as it is at a higher level in the software stack in any case... <br><br>-- Dave Ritchie<br></div></div>
</blockquote></div><br></div>