Can Disk Alignment Cause Corruption?

[JohnLeo9]

Hello.  I am not that familiar with disk alignments, but from what I read they should not be done on Windows Boot Partitions, Dynamic Disks, or partitions with data already.  Is this true?

I have a client that performed disk alignments on several Windows 2003 / XenApp 4.5 VM guests running on VMware 4 using VM converter and vOptimizer.  These servers were already built and in production before the alignment; I still have to verify if they had dynamic disks though.

Anyway, now several of the VM's seem to randomly wipe out most of the files on the C partition and they have to rebuild them.  The problem is they are cloning them from images taken after the disk alignment and the drives eventually get wiped again.  Could this corruption be caused by the disk alignment, or is that just a coincident?

If it is because of the alignment, is there anything they can do to correct this?

Thank you,

John

[farkasharry]

Basically, disk realignment should work on any type of partitions. In cases where the diskalignment causes trouble, try scanning/fixing/rebuilding the MBR. For howto's, google is your friend!

[som94 · Accepted solution]

Hi JohnLeo9,

welcome to community .

I dont think disk allignment will leads to crash untill unless physically hardidisk having problem.

"Life would be so much easier if we only had the source code"

[JohnLeo9]

Still not sure what is causing the disk wipes.  They have not had any issues with new guest built without the alignment, so I think they may end up restoring or rebuilding them all.

[JohnLeo9]

Could not find a solution. Rebuilt servers.

[DavidKlee]

I must have aligned 500 Windows Server 2003 VMs and not once had disk corruption caused by the alignment itself. Do you have SAN or interconnect issues underneath the VM?