Hey Zap. Really sweet guide you got going on here. Thanks for all the hard work. :thumbsup:
If you have the extra time, it would help people like me if you included the basic instructions for manually aligning the partition under XP. Thanks!
I personally have never installed XP on an SSD so I don't have personal experience. Maybe someone would like to contribute? I know that you can use Diskpart on another computer to create the partition, or you can use Vista/7 to create the partition. Maybe have a buddy of yours make a "recovery" disk with Windows Vista? It can be used to partition the drive, and then install Windows on existing partition.
Hey Zap
I've just googled my way through installing my intel x25-m g2 on my winxp laptop. I'm happy to share my findings, in the hope it will help out some other people in a similar position. So I've written it up here:
Quick and Dirty Windows XP SSD Howto
Note: lots of the credit for these tips goes to the OCZ Forum guys, at this link:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?55238-Guide-for-Win-Xp-installation-with-Diskpar-%28alignment%29-nLite-Ramdrive-Page-file-Tweaks-Browser-Tweaks-My-Doc-folder-move-and-Print-Spooler-on-Vertex
Step 1: manually align the partition
First, download diskpar.exe from
https://kb.wisc.edu/images/group14/4556/diskpar.exe
Note: diskpar.exe is
not the same thing as diskpart.exe !!!
Most instructions will tell you to install the SSD as a secondary drive in some desktop computer somewhere. But if you're like me and you're putting this in a laptop, you can't make it a secondary drive. But I figured out that you can do the manual align and format step using a USB-to-SATA adapter, so if you're like me and installing this thing on a laptop you're still ok.
Hook it all up as a secondary drive or with a USB-to-SATA adapter. Then fire up Disk Management (Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management), and check which number your SSD is. This way, you don't fry your OS drive.
Then go to a command prompt.
For me, the SSD was Disk 1 under Disk Management. So that's why I use 1. Don't screw this up, diskpar will fry your OS drive without mercy.
type
diskpar -i 1 to see the current partition info on your SSD. (You could type
diskpar -i 0 on your existing hard drive to see how xp uses a sector offset of 63 which is what we
don't want.)
Then when ready, type
diskpar -s 1
Pick a sector offset of 2048 (2048 sectors * 512 bytes/sector = 1048576 bytes = 1024kB = 1MB). This seems to be the most agreed upon offset, and it's what vista and win7 do by default when setting up a partition. Check out the OCZ forum page for more info. You could play with other sector offsets if you feel that missing that entire MEGABYTE of lost storage space on your SSD is worth wasting your life.
See the example below:
C:> diskpar -i 1
---- Drive 1 Geometry Infomation ----
Cylinders = 9729
TracksPerCylinder = 255
SectorsPerTrack = 63
BytesPerSector = 512
DiskSize = 80023749120 (Bytes) = 76316 (MB)
End of partition information. Total existing partitions: 0
C:> diskpar -s 1
Set partition can only be done on a raw drive.
You can use Disk Manager to delete all existing partitions
Are you sure drive 1 is a raw device without any partition? (Y/N) y
---- Drive 1 Geometry Infomation ----
Cylinders = 9729
TracksPerCylinder = 255
SectorsPerTrack = 63
BytesPerSector = 512
DiskSize = 80023749120 (Bytes) = 76316 (MB)
We are going to set the new disk partition.
All data on this drive will be lost. continue (Y/N)? y
Please specify starting offset (in sectors): 2048
Please specify partition length (in MB) (Max = 76315): 76315
Done setting partition.
---- New Partition information ----
StatringOffset = 1048576
PartitionLength = 80022077440
HiddenSectors = 2048
PartitionNumber = 1
PartitionType = 7
You now should use Disk Manager to format this partition
C:>
Step 2: Format partition and put your user data on there
Go back to Disk Management (click Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management).
You might need to close and reopen it if you had it open from before you used diskpar, since it sometimes doesn't update.
You will now see your SSD, right click on it and choose Format
Choose NTFS as the File System and 4096 as the Allocation Unit Size, check Quick Format, and hit “Ok”.
Now continuing to use your SATA-to-USB adapter, you can copy on any user files you want there before you install XP to the SSD. That's because you can tell XP to install to the existing partition without wiping it out. Useful. (Don't copy the OS files or any installed programs from your hard drive to the new SSD. That would be dumb.)
Step 3: Install your SSD into your computer. Flash its firmware to the latest. Install Windows XP.
I'm going to assume you know how to take care of this step.
Step 4: Tweak Windows XP to play nice with your SSD
A. Make sure no disk defragmenting is scheduled
Go into Control Panel->Scheduled Tasks
Make sure disk defragmenter isn't in there.
B.Turn off XP hard drive optimization
Download Tweak UI, one of the Powertoys for WindowsXP.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Run Tweak UI
On the left side, click on General (so the word General is highlighted).
Scroll down in the settings list, and uncheck "Optimize hard disk when idle".
C. Disable Windows Prefetch
Windows XP doesn't have SuperFetch, but it does have a prefetcher. You'll want to disable it.
I didn't look up how to do this since the Intel SSD Toolbox did it for me. If you're not using an intel SSD, then you'll need to google this.