Switching from Extended Capacity Manager to GPT after upgrading to UEFI capable motherboard or BIOS

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Quick & Dirty: I have a 3TB drive accessible via Extended Capacity Manager. I want to remove Extended Capacity Manager and convert the drive to a bootable GPT partition using UEFI capable motherboard. Can this be done? How?

Long, slow, truth: I'm grateful that your driver can allow my operating system to access the entire range of my drive. I was able to do that with Linux right out of the box with my non-UEFI BIOS. After that, I figured my 64 bit Windows 7 could as well. I was wrong (thanks, microsoft). I can partition the drive as GPT and access the whole thing but can't boot from it. Does Extended Capacity Driver just allow Windows to access a regular GPT boot partition without the use of UEFI like Linux did? Or does ECM bastardize my big drive by creating a MBR partition and virtual partition(s)? After I upgrade to a new motherboard or obtain a modded BIOS with UEFI support, I want to remove Extended Capacity Manager and convert the drive to a bootable GPT partition. Can this be done? What steps do I take to do so?

If it cannot be done, I will resign myself to using only 2TB of my big drive and moving a bunch of data (movies & music) onto a second drive to make room for more programs and games on my boot drive. After I have upgraded the motherboard, I'll have to convert the 2TB boot partition to GPT booting from UEFI, expand the boot partition to cover the entire drive, and move the movies & music back to their old home.

Mon, 10/29/2012 - 04:19
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mvp

What you could do is the following:

- do a complete disk and partition backup of your 3TB drive,
- use diskpart in Windows 7 elevated command prompt or from a command prompt from the Win7 installation DVD
- clean the disk
- convert as GPT http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465%28WS.10%29.aspx
- prepartition the disk as you want,
- restore the partitions to the prepared partitions from the recovery CD, do not restore the MBR+Track0
- use the Win7 DVD to fix your startup.

Mon, 10/29/2012 - 04:25
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That would work (KLUDGE). Since I haven't yet installed anything on the 3TB drive, my solution at the bottom of my original post would be easier. If I move to using a single ExtCapMan partition on the 3TB drive, your solution will work. The big question is, since I am using a 64 bit OS that can address the entire drive, can it just part it as GPT and provide the same kind of access to the OS that Linux magically had? I was able to boot from and address the entire drive with 64 bit Mint Linux. Drive was definitely GPT. I checked. If your ExtCapMan provides that kind of translation to the OS, I could have my drive GPT and just switch to UEFI when I change/upgrade the mobo. Will ExtCapMan do this or will it create a mishmash of MBR and virtual parts?

Mon, 10/29/2012 - 04:57