Ghost compatibility with new Advanced Format 4K sector aligned drives.
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Ghost compatibility with new Advanced Format 4K sector aligned drives.

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Article ID: 152894

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Updated On:

Products

Deployment Solution Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

You need to know if any version of Ghost Solution Suite is compatible with new 4K sector aligned drives such as Western Digital Advanced Format and Dell Advanced Format.

Ghost may display the following error when executed on a system with a native 4k Drive. "Internal error: 8027, An Internal inconsistency has been detected"

Resolution

Symantec Ghost is compatible with Advanced Format hard drives in emulation mode only.  Using ghost on a system with a Native 4k drive attached is not supported at this time.  

For more information on the difference between a Native Advanced 4K drive and a 4K Sector Disk with 512-byte Emulation drive see Microsoft Article Advanced format (4K) disk compatibility update

To determine if a system is configured as 4k Native of 512 emulation drive run the following command from a command prompt

fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo D: (the drive letter of the 4k drive)

A 4K Native Disk has the "Bytes Per Sector" and "Bytes Per Physical Sector" fields both set to 4096 and isn't supported for cloning. 
A 4K Sector Disk with 512-byte Emulation will report  "Bytes Per Sector" set to 512 and the "Bytes Per Physical Sector" field set to 4096 and is supported for cloning. 

Some manufactures have utilities that can be used to change the format from Native 4k to 512 byte emulation to allow these drive to be used by Ghost.  Contact your hardware manufacturer for more information on how to change a drive's formatting. 

 

As of Ghost Soulution Suite and Ghost standard tools 3.1 MP3 an image can now be saved to an external drive that is set up as 4k native mode.   This will allow the use of external advance format 4k native drives to be used as a destination for saving ghost images on.   Ghost images can then aslo be restored from the same advanced format 4k native drive.   Ghost can still not restore images to a 4k native drive, only that it can use a 4k native drive as a destination to save the .gho and .ghs files on.   Additionally a 4k native drive holding .gho and .ghs files can be used as the souce for performing Disk from image restore jobs.