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Contango
Asked: 2015-07-30 10:04:44 +0800 CST

Error: "All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid."

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I was trying to create a mirrored drive in Disk Management, but I kept on getting this error:

"All disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size, and the sector size must be valid."

windows-7

3 Answers

  1. The problem is that I was starting with a drive full of data, and wanted to add a mirror of said drive.

    This will not always work, and the error it gives is meaningless at best, and misleading at worst.

    A solution is to start with two unallocated volumes, and select "New Mirrored Volume":

    enter image description here

    There are loads of videos on YouTube which describe how to do this, the one that I successfully used was Set up a Mirrored Array in Windows 7.

    Update

    It is possible to avoid this error, see the answer from @CyberPonk.

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  2. I had this problem as well. I am on Windows 10 Version 1607 and I had my data volume in a mirror with 2 1TB drives (My system drive is a Samsung SSD). I did a warranty replacement with Seagate and when the replacement arrived, I was unable to add it to my mirror due to this issue. Using diskpart or diskmgmt.msc did not work. ...In the end, using the good drive in the mirror, I copied all the data on the remaining good drive to another 2TB drive I had lying around. I used diskpart's CLEAN command on both 1TB Seagate drives and then I was able to mirror them without complaints from windows.

    Other things I noted during the process:

    • Using Seatool (Seagate Disk Tools Software) the new replacement 1TB drive has the same Logical Sector size = 512, BUT a different larger physical sector size (older drive = 512, replacement = 4096). I suspect this might have been the cause, but it does not explain why I was able to mirror the drives after using the diskpart CLEAN command.
    • The other thing I tried was a Storage Pool, and that did not work at all even after using the diskpart CLEAN Command.
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  3. Best Answer

    I had this error too, and managed to get passed it by doing the process from DISKPART instead of disk management GUI.

    To do that, open DISKPART from a command prompt, then (assuming disk 1 is the source drive, and disk 2 is the destination drive)

    rescan
select disk 1 
convert dynamic
select disk 2
convert dynamic

list volume
(then find the volume number for the partition you wish to mirror)
assuming this volume is 1:

select volume 1
add disk=2

    That should do what disk management coudn´t

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