By Mark Ward technology correspondent, BBC News Windows 7 is one of few operating systems that are "4K aware" Hard drives are about to undergo one of the biggest format shifts in 30 years.By early 2011 all hard drives will use an "advanced format" that changes how they go about saving the data people store on them. The move to the advanced format will make it easier for hard drive makers to produce bigger drives that use less power and are more reliable. However, it might mean problems for Windows XP users who swap an old drive for one using the changed format. Error codesSince the days of the venerable DOS operating system, the space on a hard drive has been formatted into blocks 512 bytes in size. The 512 byte sector became standardised thanks to IBM which used it on floppy disks. While 512 bytes was useful when hard drives were only a few megabytes in size, it makes less sense when drives can hold a terabyte (1000 gigabytes), or more of data.[Read more...]