Installing XP to a 64kbit-cluster partition...

[Sesshy]

Hey, first post here. Anyhow, I'm trying to install XP Pro to a partition with 64kb clusters, (for better performance, it's a 320 gig drive anyways) and I've been trying to use partition magic 8 to do it. I have one 75 gig partition at the start of the platter for the OS and other various program files, and the rest of the drive is just for file storage.

The trouble is, no matter what I try to do, XP doesn't want to boot off of the partition I made with Partition Magic unless I use the XP install disc to format the partition, which automatically uses 4kb clusters. I tried to install XP onto the partition using the XP disc while Windows was already running on my main drive, (extracting the installation files onto it, etc.) and all that did was use the boot file from my main drive to load the XP setup for the new partition when I rebooted. <_<;

Anyways, can anybody tell me what I might be doing wrong? I'm not quite that stupid, I made the partition the primary one and whatnot...

[Paul Komski]

You dont say which file system you are using but "To support FAT partitions that are greater than 4 GB using 128- or 256-KB clusters, the drives must use sectors that are greater than 512 bytes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314878/)" and I don't think that is commonplace.

With NTFS I doubt if the cluster size will significantly directly affect performance but can theoretically make data storage more or less efficient. There is generally less fragmentation with large clusters (hence indirect effects on performance) but even fragmentation (unless of the mft itself) is not generally so important under NTFS.

and all that did was use the boot file from my main drive to load the XP setup for the new partition
If you install a new or parallel installation to an existing partition structure then unless you delete the existing active partition WinXP's setup will continue to use the original active partition as its system drive. A New installation only uses a new active partition if it starts from scratch or if you create and mark an appropriate new active partition prior to running the setup from outside of windows. The active partition can be a small one but the windows boot partition can be anywhere accessible by the system though booted from the active partition.

[Paul Komski]

I have been experimenting with PM and with BiNG and I cannot get WinXP setup to accept any pre-formatted NTFS partition of any type or using defaults or even using 512-byte clusters.

It thus seems that with NTFS you must let WinXP create its own installation partition (for reasons that would be interesting to know) though it will access and use other NTFS partitions formatted with 3rd Party Utilities as data/storage partitions after setup has completed.

So it appears the problem is not with cluster sizes per se but with the fact that WinXP Setup has to format its own boot and system partitions if they are pre-formatted as NTFS and will not accept or see pre-formatted NTFS partitions made by other apps even though it will happily see them once Windows is up and running.

[Paul Komski]

Clean installed WinXP letting it do its own thing onto NTFS. Then used PM to resize the clusters. It wouldnt allow 64K but would allow 32K (on an 80gig single partitioned HDD) and Windows seems to be just fine afterwards. Above 4K no file compression will be tolerated.

[Sesshy]

Hrm... So, go with installing XP using its own formatting, and then later externally resize the cluster size of the partition... I didn't realize you could change the cluster size without reformatting, sounds like a plan. ^^ And yeah, Paul, I am using NTFS. o.o Thanks so much for doing all of this experimentation crap, even if it was out of your own curiosity. XD I'll try all that and post how it works out.

~Sesshy