Moving WD20EARS drive to multi-boot system

[tluxon]

I have an advanced format WD20EARS drive in my aging XP Pro SP3 PC that I'm moving to a new build that's set up to boot to XP, Win 7 x86, and Win 7 x64. It's only used for multimedia data - primarily videos and music, but some photos as well.

When I installed it in the old PC, I ran WD Align on it prior to formatting as a single-partition drive, not fully understanding whether that would be better than using the pins 7 & 8 jumper or not.

I now understand it would've been best to format this drive with Windows 7 originally, but I didn't do that. I've backed up all the files on it so I can reformat it in the new PC with Windows 7 if that's the way to go, but I don't know if I can or if I even need to now that it's been formatted with Win XP after being WD Aligned.

Can someone please advise and provide a brief explanation for their advice?

Thanks!

 

[tluxon]

I found what looked like really helpful information back in the thread, Clearing up the confusion about Advanced Format and Windows XP, but I didn't really get if it would apply to a multi-boot system or not.

I ran a drive benchmark on it in PC Wizard (CPUID), and saw that the read and write speeds were about half of what they are on the two other drives in the system. I guess I should assume it would be best to try to reformat the drive with Windows 7, but is that even possible once WD Align has been run on the drive?

Does anybody know?

 

[tluxon]

FYI, I found what seems to be quite useful information at How to make sure 2TB Western Digital is good for Windows XP.

Since it's going to take a long time to copy all the files back onto this drive, I think I'll run WD Align on it from Windows 7 just to see if it can shift everything without having to copy all the files back. If that doesn't result in better performance, I'll just bite the bullet on the time consuming copy and repartition and format from inside Windows 7. Based on what I've read, it should then work fine in both 7 and XP.