64K clusters and Maxblast?

[notfromhere]

I decided to expand my HTPC's storage, and went out and snagged a 250GB Maxtor SATA HDD. My motherboard (an MSI K7N2G-ILSR that has otherwise proved quite nice) says that it doesn't support drives over 137GB, so I installed Maxblast 3, and everything seems to be working, except trying to get a 64K-cluster format going. Maxblast 3 has decided that under no circumstances will it do an NTFS format with anything other than 4K clusters.

I'm really disappointed about this (I've got some stutter issues which I think are 4K related), and wondering if I've missed anything.

Any ideas on how I can format with 64K clusters using Maxblast? Is there even a way?

Thanks!

Bill

[IKK]

The only way I was able to do this was through windows system maintance. I tried Partion Magic and would not give me the NTSF 64k partion only Fat 64k.

[mangriotis]

Is it really worth it to have 64k block size? Can anyone quantify the advantages?

I understand the theory, but what is the realized performance improvement by doing this. I would be willing to wipe everything off and start over using 64k blocks if I knew performance would be increased significantly.

[dkardatzke]

Matt,

It made a significant difference when I partitioned and reformatted about 6 months ago. Before 64k block sizes I would get some video stuttering. Afterwards, minimal unrelated problems.

[JJarmoc]

Is there a way to switch to 64k blocks short of doing a full reformat? Parition magic will probably do it, but can it be done within Win2000/XP?

[Xleon]

Is it worth going higher than 64K? My system works a lot better with 64K blocks and this is the maximum Windows will format to.

BUT, I've found in one of my software tools apps I have, it says NTFS blocks can be 128K or larger. I don't know if you could use a drive app to format it to this size and still allow Windows to natively support it.

[mangriotis]

Ok, using Partition Magic 8.0, I attempted to convert a 200GB volume (with ~150GB of data on it (I know, first mistake)) from 4k NTFS to 64k NTFS. All seemed to be going well for about 10 minutes. The progress tracking got to 89% complete, then it took about 2-3 hours to align data. It finally reached 100%, then said Error 878... and aborted.

It restarted the system and of course, now I have an unreadable volume. I did a quick reformat using WD Data Lifeguard software, and did a volume media scan (which reported no errors). I have not yet written anything else to the drive. Luckily, there was mostly shows and movie rips on that drive, no necessary stuff. My question now is, Can I recover anything from this drive? Anyone know (or have access to) any data recovery type software??

I would appreciate any help.

Remember next time, maybe you shouldn't have that much data on the drive when converting to 64k clusters...oh well.

[Xleon]

Very unlikely. If it was a simple format, then there is a remote possibility you could get the data back, but as you have change the block sizes and formatted, it's almost certainly all gone.

The only program I know of that can extract the seemingly impossible is EasyRecovery Professional Edition, but I think pricing starts at $130 and upwards.

[Tej]

Wait!

Before you do anything else, call Powerquest Tech support. I had a similar problem once with PM 6. It was my own fault, I thought the machine had locked up, but apparently that last 1% jump from 99 to 100% can take HOURS

Powerquest tech support was able to step me through the process of editing the MBR and I was able to save everything. It took only 15 minutes. Spent more time on hold waiting for someone to answer

If that doesn't work, I'd suggest d/l'ing the Easyrecover Pro demo (on another drive) and checking if it can "see" any data on your lost drive. Then you can decide if the price is worth it.

Good luck.