You can do partition realignment with free tools like a Linux live CD with GParted and sfdisk/cfdisk (these are part of pretty much every distro), although currently it needs 2 physical devices because GParted only allows you to move/resize by megabyte, not by absolute sector number.


I just did this for my XP Pro SP3 install on my regular WD Velociraptor (moved from default 63/255/63 offset/geometry to 1024/32/32 - bootup sped up unexpectedly by 10s, more likely to be artifact of copying partitions than realignment).


I basically copied the partition over to another device (Vertex LE but besides the point), repartitioned the old one with sfdisk and cfdisk to have the correctly laid out new partition, did a resize on the copy to make it slightly smaller, then copied back into the new partition. Then added a new bootblock with install-mbr, since I wiped out the default one. That doesn't make much difference BTW, I'll probably install Win 7 and Kubuntu 10.04 next, so it will be replaced again for triple boot with Grub.


The drawbacks of this method are that you have to know what you're doing and that depending on distro sfdisk and cfdisk have different ideas about what an allowable layout is (the versions in Kubuntu 9.10 are apparently more permissive than the ones in 10.04, GParted live ISO's sfdisk version has an initial size limit of ~17 GiB with this geometry etc.) 



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ntfsresize is a free Unix utility that non-destructively resizes the NTFS filesystem used by Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista typically on a hard-disk partitio
----another method here [[http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?72132-Vertex-LE-behaviour-observations-and-offset-geometry-tips]]


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http://www.linuxconfig.org/linux-wd-ears-advanced-format