[Tets]

The last of my PC parts for my upgrade arrived today, and needless to say I'm super stoked. Everything is up and running, and I could hardly be happier, with the exception of one key issue. I neglected to factor in upgrading from an old BIOS motherboard to one with UEFI. Since my HDD has an MBR partition table, the Windows 7 installer won't let me do anything. If I had any foresight, I would've simply partitioned the drive with GPT when I first installed it, but that's in the past now.

This is unfortunately the largest HDD I own, at 1TB, and it contains two reasonably filled partitions I really would hate to lose, so I can't simply backup my data and start over from scratch. I'm wondering if there's a reliable method to non-destructively convert my MBR partition table to GPT. I understand there could be complications with doing this to a system disk, but since I'm reinstalling Windows anyway, I don't think it should be an issue.

Could definitely use some advice here, as I'm somewhat out of my element. This is the first time I've owned anything remotely approaching current gen hardware, and though I managed to cover all my other bases, this one was obscure enough to escape my notice. If what it comes down to is installing a new HDD, then so be it, but I want to avoid this if possible.

[GerbilSoft]

gptfdisk has support for converting MBR to GPT. Do note that there are some limitations, and reliability isn't 100% guaranteed. I'd recommend making a backup of critical files before attempting to use gptfdisk.

MBR2GPT (and GPT2MBR) tutorial

If the drive is megabyte-aligned (which it should be if partitioned with Windows Vista or later), then MBR2GPT conversion should be doable.

Note that EFI typically requires a separate EFI system partition, which is formatted as FAT32. You may need to resize a partition using gparted in order to get that working. http://www.rodsbooks...sk/booting.html

I recommend reading through all of gptfdisk's documentation before attempting a conversion.

[If all else fails, maybe consider using a small SSD as the OS drive?]

This post has been edited by GerbilSoft: 22 November 2013 - 09:27 PM

[Tets]

I am eventually planning on adding a SSD to the mix, so I might just be better off with that and leaving my HDD alone. In any case, I don't plan on fucking with my partition tables until I feel like I really know what I'm doing. Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely do some research into gptfdisk.

For the time being, my Windows 7 installation strangely seems to be running all right having been transplanted from one box to another, and has no trouble at all booting in its current configuration. I wasn't even trying to boot it, it just happened after I was a bit too late inserting one of my live CDs. I was fully expecting it to crash and burn like I'm used to, but here I am. It's not something I'm comfortable working with for very long, but it'll do the job for now.