Cannot write System Image to new external HD.

Jim
Thanks for your reply.
I followed all of your links in prior post, but no help found. The WD site suggests using their WD Quick Formatter Tool but no link to find this tool. & my drive is a Seagate!
As mentioned, I have reformatted the external HD using Disk Manager in win7. This did not help.

Some replies have suggested using an alternative backup software. I have no personal attachment to MS utilities but have no desire to rely on a drive that cannot function with these standard programs or one that depends on a particular software solution to function correctly.

Additional information relating to sector size of new HD.
In the event that "advanced HD" or physical sector size has anything to do with the problem (which I doubt).
running from command line as admin:

"fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo" reports:
Bytes per sector: 4096
Bytes per physical sector: <Not supported>

blumesan said:

Additional information relating to sector size of new HD.
In the event that "advanced HD" or physical sector size has anything to do with the problem (which I doubt).
running from command line as admin:

"fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo" reports:
Bytes per sector: 4096
Bytes per physical sector: <Not supported>

<not supported> is key:

Microsoft support policy for 4K sector hard drives in Windows

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx

Jim,
Based on your references:

If the “Byte Per Physical Sector” field displays “Not Supported” then either
the storage driver does not support IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY, or there was
an error in retrieving the info.

Yet my computer has already installed the MS hotfix for this problem.
Alternatively the <Not supported> response might suggest that this HD is not "advanced formatted"

Bottom line, is there a solution (other than using 3rd party software) or do I just return the HD?

blumesan said:

Jim,
Based on your references:

If the “Byte Per Physical Sector” field displays “Not Supported” then either
the storage driver does not support IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY, or there was
an error in retrieving the info.

Yet my computer has already installed the MS hotfix for this problem.
Alternatively the <Not supported> response might suggest that this HD is not "advanced formatted"

Bottom line, is there a solution (other than using 3rd party software) or do I just return the HD?

If you have the hotfix applied, I would think your FSUTIL command would return 4096 for bytes-for-physical-sector but it's not.

To review. Windows System Image seems to ONLY support physical drives that have 512-byte physical sector size. So, your "not supported" OR 4096 won't work for Windows 7 System Image. To fix, per solutions you'd need to reformat with your disk vendor's format program and choose 512-byte physical sector size and you'd be good to go.