How do I format an external hard drive to 4K (advance format)?

cis4life

Commendable
Jan 4, 2017
1
0
1,510
Good Day
I have a Samsung T3 1tb external ssd that I need to format to 4K (4096 sector). I'm trying to winclone a bootcamp image of my windows 10 to the drive from my MacBook 2016 but I'm getting a sector mismatch. I guess I need to advance format the drive to 4096 in order to get the image to be bootable. How would I do that?

Thanks for any insights
 
Solution
To verify the kind of drive that you have, follow these steps:
1. Install http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018.
2. Run the following command from elevated command prompt:

Fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x: (where x: represents the drive that you are checking)

3. Use the values for "Bytes Per Sector" and "Bytes per Physical Sector" to determine the kind of drive that you have. To do this, use the following table:

see table on this page ( I would copy it here but formatting doesn't want to play nice)

that just confirms drive is right format, still trying to work out how to format it

I wonder if win 10 can boot off a 4k sector drive.. i know it supports them but as storage but I wonder if it can boot them.

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
To verify the kind of drive that you have, follow these steps:
1. Install http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982018.
2. Run the following command from elevated command prompt:

Fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo x: (where x: represents the drive that you are checking)

3. Use the values for "Bytes Per Sector" and "Bytes per Physical Sector" to determine the kind of drive that you have. To do this, use the following table:

see table on this page ( I would copy it here but formatting doesn't want to play nice)

that just confirms drive is right format, still trying to work out how to format it

I wonder if win 10 can boot off a 4k sector drive.. i know it supports them but as storage but I wonder if it can boot them.
 
Solution