Can I convert my Win8.1 disk to GPT?

bartNL

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I just installed Win8.1 on my PC, but I see the (SSD)disk which contains the OS, is an MBR disk. As far as I know, I chose GPT everywhere I could choose, so windows itself must have chosen to make the disk MBR. Does this in any way affect performance? Either way, I guess GPT is just better and more futureproof than the prehistorical MBR which dates back to the 80s. And next to that, I'd like to use UEFI since it's to be a lot quicker than the classic BIOS. I could be wrong, but I believe EUFI would only work with GPT, therefore I need the disk to be a GPT one.

So I was wondering if I could just convert the disk to GPT. However, while 3rd party tools give me that option, Windows Disk Management does not. Thus I was questioning if there was a reason for this, and whether there could go something wrong, or if I could mess up my OS when I do this or not. I think it's rather strange that Win8.1, chooses to make an MBR disk rather than choosing the superior GPT. Any advice?
Cheers
 
Solution
First some background:
GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. It’s a new standard that’s gradually replacing MBR. It’s associated with UEFI — UEFI replaces the clunky old BIOS with something more modern, and GPT replaces the clunky old MBR partitioning system with something more modern. It’s called GUID Partition Table because every partition on your drive has a “globally unique identifier,” or GUID — a random string so long that every GPT partition on earth likely has its own unique identifier.

This system doesn’t have MBR’s limits. Drives can be much, much larger and size limits will depend on the operating system and its file systems. GPT allows for a nearly unlimited amount of partitions, and the limit here will be your operating...

cilliers

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First some background:
GPT stands for GUID Partition Table. It’s a new standard that’s gradually replacing MBR. It’s associated with UEFI — UEFI replaces the clunky old BIOS with something more modern, and GPT replaces the clunky old MBR partitioning system with something more modern. It’s called GUID Partition Table because every partition on your drive has a “globally unique identifier,” or GUID — a random string so long that every GPT partition on earth likely has its own unique identifier.

This system doesn’t have MBR’s limits. Drives can be much, much larger and size limits will depend on the operating system and its file systems. GPT allows for a nearly unlimited amount of partitions, and the limit here will be your operating system — Windows allows up to 128 partitions on a GPT drive, and you don’t have to create an extended partition.

On an MBR disk, the partitioning and boot data is stored in one place. If this data is overwritten or corrupted, you’re in trouble. In contrast, GPT stores multiple copies of this data across the disk, so it’s much more robust and can recover if the data is corrupted. GPT also stores cyclic redundancy check (CRC) values to check that its data is intact — if the data is corrupted, GPT can notice the problem and attempt to recover the damaged data from another location on the disk. MBR had no way of knowing if its data was corrupted — you’d only see there was a problem when the boot process failed or your drive’s partitions vanished.

MBR works with disks up to 2 TB in size, but it can’t handle disks with more than 2 TB of space. MBR also only supports up to four primary partitions — if you want more, you have to make one of your primary partitions an “extended partition” and create logical partitions inside it. This is a silly little hack and shouldn’t be necessary. Windows can only boot from GPT on UEFI-based computers running 64-bit versions of Windows 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, and corresponding server versions. All versions of Windows 8.1, 8, 7, and Vista can read GPT drives and use them for data — they just can’t boot from them. Ref: http://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/

To answer your question:
Yes it is possible to convert the disk to GPT without losing any data :) Here is a tutorial http://www.disk-partition.com/gpt-mbr/convert-mbr-to-gpt-without-data-loss.html

 
Solution

bartNL

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@cilliers: I know about GPT and MBR, UEFI and BIOS, but thanks for assuring me. I think it'll certainly be helpful for any future readers, and there were some details in it I didn't know about, too. That link of you seems to be very promising, but while they promise 'lossles conversion', converting using diskpart and Windows disk Management requires the disk to be emptied. So, that wouldn't be without dataloss. But converting using their tool, on the other hand, would do this conversion without dataloss? I tried to find out if you lose data when using the diskpart method with a spare disk, but diskpart errored saying it couldn't convert a cd-rom. There's not even an optical disk drive in my PC. If you can say if you would lose data when using either one of these two methods, I can select your answer as the solution. Thanks for your effort.
 

bartNL

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That AOMEI stuff did the trick for me. Luckily, I had an old laptop so I could try it out.
Maybe the other programs can do it too with data loss, but this one is confirmed to be able to now.
Thanks