Partition Magic Software Partition magic software for Windows Server 2000/2003/2008/2008 R2/2012/2012 R2, Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10, etc.
GPT versus MBR
- GUID Partition Table (GPT) is the next generation of a hard disk partitioning scheme developed to lift restrictions of the old MBR. Being a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel to replace the outdated PC BIOS, it offers a number of crucial benefits:
- Up to 128 primary partitions for the Windows implementation (only 4 in MBR);
- The maximum allowed partition size is 18 exabytes (only 2 terabytes in MBR);
- More reliable thanks to replication and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) protection of the partition table;
- A well defined and fully self-identifying partition format (data critical to the platform operation is located in partitions, but not in un-partitioned or hidden sectors as this is the case with MBR)
To tackle compatibility problems with older operating systems there has been introduced a special combined GPT+MBR partitioning scheme called Retained GPT (also known as Hybrid GPT), where the first three partitions except for EFI (GPT service partition) are synced between GPT and MBR. This synced partition map provides an avenue, for instance for booting 32-bit Windows Vista/7 on computers controlled by the old BIOS. It's also used for dual booting Mac OS X and Windows on a GPT disk.
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