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Convert external disk from MBR to GPT
Portable hard disk is now widely used to store and exchange data, and the capacity of this kind of devices has reached to several TB or more. But disappointingly when using a large-capacity disk, a lot of users have been or are being troubled by the following situation:
“I have a 3TB portable drive (actually there is 2.8TB space in total), but only 2TB space is available, and I can do nothing in the extra 820GB space. What should I do”
This problem appears largely because users initialized the external disk to MBR at the beginning of the time. Why MBR disk has such a limitation? MBR, namely Master Boot Record, stores partition entries by using 32-bit sector addresses and 32-bit sector counts, which limits the addressable storage of a MBR disk to 2TB:
2^32×512=2199023255552bytes=2147483648KB=2097152MB=2048GB=2TB).
At this time, the best solution to this problem is converting external disk from MBR disk to GPT which supports up to 18EB partition.
Well then, how can we change MBR disk to GPT disk? You can do it in Windows Disk Management, but all partitions (or volumes) on MBR disk should be deleted in advance. If users want to complete the conversion without losing any partition, they’d better employ a third party partitioning program, and the freeware MiniTool Partition Wizard is worth trying since it is a piece of read-only software. For detailed steps, please see the following example.
Convert External Disk from MBR to GPT in Partition Wizard
After connecting the portable disk with computer, please start and launch the free partitioning program to get the main interface shown below:
Then, select the MBR disk and choose “Convert MBR Disk to GPT Disk” from the left action panel.
Now we can see 3 pending operations on the left side. At this time, please click “Apply” button. Then, MiniTool Partition Wizard will perform all changes automatically, and all data and partitions will be reserved.
These are all steps to change MBR disk to GPT disk. It is so easy to do the conversion, isn’t it?
Tip: MiniTool Partition Wizard allows users to convert a non-system disk from MBR to GPT only since MBR disk and GPT disk have different boot mode.
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