I'm trying to clear up some confusion over partition alignment. I had understood that with Windows 2008 and later versions of Windows, partitions are always aligned, but I need to prove it to my manager.
Step One - Can someone please tell me what I can use to accurately display the starting offset of a spanned volume across dynamic disks? Until I can get this information, I can't find out if this type of volume is properly aligned. I am told to use diskdiag.exe for Windows 2008 and later, but it's almost as if this doesn't exist. I just can't find a download of it.
I need to check a crucial VM, which is Windows 2008 R2 with several partitions. All of the disks are simple, expect for two of them which are 150 GB and 100 GB, joined together in a SPANNED volume. The problem is that both WMIC and DMdiag (probably because it's not compatible with newer versions of Windows) can't be trusted for reporting this accurately, or reporting it at all for that matter.
The other thing I'm wondering is if I'm wasting my time checking this. Because the VM is running Windows 2008 R2, can I just assume the spanned volume is aligned properly? When I created this spanned volume, I used the default allocation unit size of 1024 bytes, if that helps.
Thanks.