Systems, devices, methods, and computer program products are provided for aligning I/O access from a host operating system with the underlying storage system. A storage operating system can be configured to determine, either manually via operator input or automatically, the size of a data offset caused by misaligned I/O access from a host operating system to a first virtual drive. To align I/O access, the storage operating system can initialize a second virtual disk that is partitioned to accommodate the size of the data offset. The storage operating system can copy header information and main data information from the first virtual disk to the second virtual disk as a background process, non-disruptively aligning the I/O access from the host operating system.