How to convert MBR to GPT

In This Article, we are going to show you how to convert your hard disk from MBR to GPT. First, Let’s say why you might need to do this.

Have you ever seen this Error during Windows installation?

(Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk has an MBR partition table. On EFI systems, Windows can only be installed to GPT disks.)

Firstly, you may want to ask these questions:

-Is GBT better than MBR?

-Why some people want to convert MBR to GPT?

To answer these questions, we are going to discuss some of the differences between GPT & MBR.

The main two differences between MBR & GPT:

1. Number of Partitions: MBR Disks can support 4 main partitions or 3main partitions and an extended on; However, GPT Disks can support more than 128 partitions in windows.
2. Partitions’ space: Each partition of MBR Disks can have a maximum of 2TB space. This amount for each partition of GPT disks is more than 2TB.

Other amazing benefits of GPT disk:

1. The ability of saving multiple copies of data on OS (Operating System.)
2. If data were overwritten or damaged, GBT disk can recover them. So, the OS can work again. However, MBR disk doesn’t have this option so it can’t easily recover the overwritten or damaged data.

Two solutions for how to convert MBR to GPT:

1.Converting from MBR to GPT through Windows installation process:

• To convert MBR to GPT Follow the follwing steps:

Step 1.Insert the installation DVD/Flash to your Pc and restart it.

Step 2.Boot the DVD/Flash on UEFI mode.

Step 3.Choose the custom installation

Step 4.Select all the partitions and delete them

Step 5.Click on unallocated space drive and click next.

After this, all of your partitions have been deleted, Now by following the rest of these steps, you can convert your disk type from MBR to GPT.

• Converting MBR to GPT using command prompt:

Step 6. On the same window (partitions) of the installation process, After doing all the above steps, press shift+f10 to open command prompt

Step 7.Type in Diskpart in cmd and then type in list disk and press Enter.

Step 8.Type in select disk DiskNumber to choose the drive that you want to convert.

Step 9.Type in Clean to clean all the partitions on that disk.

Step 10.Run “Convert gpt” to convert the chosen disk to GPT.

Now that you’ve finished all these steps, you can continue the rest of the installation just like a usuall one by creating partitions with GPT type.

2.Converting from MBR to GPT using third-party softwares:

There are hard disk management softwares that are produced to ease hard disk related issues separated from OS layer and etc. just by booting these during the system startup. One of softwares in this category that our team have personally experienced is “Paragon hard disk manager”.

For using this solution you just need to insert the bootable disk of this software on your boot device and use the disk management wizard of this software in order to convert your MBR disk to GPT one. After that you can easily do the windows installation process.