Windows 7: My storage drive is not properly aligned

So, after installing an external drive tonight and playing around with some stuff, I found that my internal Western Digital caviar black is not aligned properly in my Windows 7 box. I know the root cause of the problem was cloning the disk from the Seagate that I used to have to this WD Caviar black.



The drive itself is a WD1001FALS-00K1B0, so it's not an advanced format drive.

I'd like to fix the alignment with the least amount of effort possible. I think my best bet is to backup the 600G of stuff off that drive onto my external drive, then delete the partition, create a new one within Windows 7 and then copy the data back. Does that sound right?

Western Digital and Seagate offer a user license to Acronis which should be available for download at WD Support > Downloads > Select Product once you identify the drive model. I have the full Acronis pack and use it to clone drive images and it has been an excellent tool when I had a similar issue with a drive that was not aligned properly, making an image on an external drive then formatting the errant drive and reimaging solved the problem.

Yeah, I have no need to image this drive as it's simply data storage. Downloads, ISO's, virtual machine files, etc. So, moving them elsewhere and putting them back is no big deal.

For the record, I backed up all of my data to my external drive, deleted the storage partition on my drive, re-created the partition and applied a quick NTFS partition and all is properly aligned once again. Just in the process of doing robocopy to move my files back to my internal storage drive now from my external drive.