I am getting this error when I try to Mirror two 1.5 TB drives. The are Barracuda ST1500DL003: All Disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size and the sector must be valid. These are the exact same disks. Does anybody understand what is going on. My client has a lot of data configurations on the master disk, and yes I can image it and backup it up, but I also want to make sure he can still work with the system without having to re-image. Thanks very much for looking at the post, Rick Arnold Rick Arnold Arnoldconsult, MCP

Hi, May I know if you want to mirror system drive? If so, you can refer to these articles. However, it is not recommended to mirror the system drive for backup. Since the main system drive will be copied to mirrored drive, the mirrored drive may crash as well. How to set up dynamic boot partition mirroring on GUID partition table (GPT) disks in Windows Server 2008 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951985 Configuring Disk Mirroring for Windows Server 2008 R2 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23476 Regarding the error message, I would like to share the following post with you. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverfiles/thread/dc113f43-61d9-4929-afe9-fe3536ea937d/ Niki TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback hereNiki Han TechNet Community Support

Hi, May I know if you want to mirror system drive? If so, you can refer to these articles. However, it is not recommended to mirror the system drive for backup. Since the main system drive will be copied to mirrored drive, the mirrored drive may crash as well. How to set up dynamic boot partition mirroring on GUID partition table (GPT) disks in Windows Server 2008 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951985 Configuring Disk Mirroring for Windows Server 2008 R2 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23476 Regarding the error message, I would like to share the following post with you. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverfiles/thread/dc113f43-61d9-4929-afe9-fe3536ea937d/ Niki TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback hereNiki Han TechNet Community Support

Hi, Any update on this issue? Niki TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedbackhereNiki Han TechNet Community Support

I opened a technet case and microsoft was looking at my system for a several hours yesterday. As a result of my case, Microsoft has issued a new KB 2714829. There is an issue with the large drives and formatting from the manufacturers. Orginally drives were formatted with a 512 KB cluster, however with the advent of larger drives manfacturers are now formatting with 4KB cluster and this new formatting is called Advanced Format. It appears this format is incompatiable with Microsoft software RAID even though the disk are exactly the same size and manufacturer if they are using the 4 KB clustering you will get his error and not be able to execute a RAID software Mirror. Rick Arnold Arnoldconsult, MCP

Here is the end result of the investigation from Microsoft on this error. Manufacturers of Hard Drives are using a new format to manufacture drives, and it is called advanced format. Advanced format, AF, is a departure from legacy drives in that AF drives are formatted with 4KB clusters and not 512 KB as with the "legacy drives." Microsoft, at this time does not support 4kb clustering for windows software mirroring. At the consumer level, these drives are not labeled as to weather they are AF or not. If software mirroring is going to be a part of a job, the consumer must do investigation on the drive of interest to determine whether or not AF is being used. Rick Arnold Arnold ConsultingRick Arnold Arnoldconsult, MCP