The most easiest way to clone MBR drive to GPT in a MBR and GPT, if you have ever tried to install an Operating System on your own then you must have faced this issue. It often leaves the user confused as to which format, they should choose and how can they do so. In this post you will learn what MBR and GPT formats are and which one should you choose for installing an OS on your machine.
What are MBR and GPT partitions?
MBR which stands for Master Boot Record is partition type that uses standard BIOS partition table. It is the classic way for doing partitions on a disk i.e., it was used in the earlier systems or systems that have the storage space of less than 2TB. The MBR partitions are always less than 4 in number, usually marked as the Local Disk C, D and E.
GPT which stands for GUID Partition Table use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface or also known as UEFI. These are the modern partition types that can have more than 4 partitions. The GPT partition is used if the storage space is higher than 2TB.
So, this could be one of the deciding factors when it comes between choosing MBR and GPT. If you have a storage requirement of more than 2TB than go for GPT partition and if you have a storage space of less than 2TB then go for the MBR partition.
How to convert MBR into GPT and vice versa?
There are several different methods to convert a MBR partition into a GPT one. Let’s look at each one of them:
Clone MBR to GPT via Rufus
If you have installed any operating system on your machine then you must have heard about “rufus”. Rufus is an application that helps you make your USB drive bootable so that an Operating System can be installed off of it.
Rufus offers the option of converting the drive partition type to the one that matches yours. Let’s look at images down below to understand it better.
- Step 1 – Open cmd on your machine and type in the “diskpart” command (without the quotes/inverted commas) and hit enter.
- Step 2 – Type “list disk” and hit enter to find out all the disk partitions type, from there you can check if the disk partition is GPT or MBR. Here it is GPT.
- Step 3 – Now from the Rufus window, the partition type can be selected from the Partition Scheme menu.
- Step 4 – Click on the Partition Scheme menu and select GPT as in our case the partition type was GPT.
- Step 5 – You can now easily install the Operating System on your machine without any problem.
Converting MBR to GPT while installing windows or any other OS.
Sometimes while we are making our USB drive bootable, we overlook this partition type feature and it causes problems for us later or maybe the OS drive is already in a different partition format than our storage drive. In this case, we have to convert our storage drive into a different partition type i.e., similar to the partition of the USB drive. The following steps will help you achieve that:
- Step 1 – While installing windows, you are going to see this window.
- Step 2 – Upon reaching here press the “Shift” + “F10” keys to open the cmd terminal.
- Step 3 – In cmd window, type “diskpart” command and hit enter.
- Step 4 – After the Step 3, type “list disk” command and hit enter to view all the disks installed on the machine.
- Step 5 – Type in “select Partition 0” (change this later) or some other disk name to choose that plate. For this situation we are choosing the partition 0 since that is the partition on which we will introduce windows.
- Step 6 – After selecting the disk, type in “clean” command and hit enter to delete the data from the disk.
- Step 7 – The last step is to enter the “convert GPT” command to convert the partition type of the disk. This will successfully convert the partition type to GPT.
- Step 8 – Enter the “exit” command twice and you will return to the installation window from where you can now easily install windows on your machine.
Outcome:
The GPT and MBR partition feature is the most common problem that one faces while installing an operating system. But I hope that this post helped you understand the difference between them and now you can handle this problem with ease.
Feel free to comment down below to let us know if this helped or if you are facing any other issues that you need help with. We are here for you.
Also read: Complete guide to Nvidia DLSS 3 : Enable it to unleash the FPS power
