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Restore Win 10 on BIOS/MBR to UEFI/GPT

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Hello,

I have an interesting problem I need help with. I have a good Acronis TI2018 backup of a Win10 system that booted on BIOS/MBR. I now need to restore the same OS to a new system that only supports UEFI. 

I setup the new drive at GPT but how do I create a UEFI boot partition and restore the OS?

 

Thank you!

 

 

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Please see the ATI 2018 User Guide: Migration method section which deals with migrating between Legacy/MBR and UEFI/GPT systems

The above section is focused primarily on using cloning but the same principles apply to using Recovery to migrate a Backup image.

In essence, you would boot your new computer using the Acronis Rescue Media booted in UEFI mode, then restore the backup to your disk drive during which process it will be migrated from MBR to GPT and the UEFI boot partition created.

Please note that there are more considerations when moving your Windows OS from one set of hardware to a new set of hardware.

You may need a new Windows 10 license unless the new hardware came activated for the same version of Windows, i.e. both old & new systems had Windows 10 Home or both had Pro etc.

You may need additional device drivers if the disk drives in the old and new systems are significantly different, i.e. old use SATA but new uses NVMe PCIe drives for which the old OS had no drivers installed.  Similarly, if the new drive uses a SATA controller mode of RAID to support a NVMe M.2 SSD drive but the old drive was standard AHCI.

You may need to create & use the Acronis Universal Restore (AUR) media to prepare the restored Windows OS to work with the new hardware components found and inject additional required device drivers.  Windows 10 is much better at handling changes of hardware so AUR is not always needed.

Finally, any installed applications that are activated based on a hardware signature will need to be reactivated when used on new hardware giving a different signature.

 Success! 

 I actually found two methods to solve this problem.  

1) I manually re-initialized the drive as GPT then installed a temporary version of Windows 10 using the Microsoft media creation tool. This new OS was booted UEFI. I then booted a TI2018 Linux version from CD and it restored the original Windows 10. Acronis automatically restored the MBR based OS to UEFI. 

 

2)  Microsoft has a tool called mbr2gpt.  It allows you to convert an MBR drive to GPT with data in place.  Supposedly you can do it live from Win10 OS, but I preferred to do it using a Windows PE boot USB drive. 

 

 

 

 

Always glad to hear of success regardless of the method to achieve it.  Thanks for your feedback.

The above comment by @jgkurz is the most helpful tip I've read on this topic: use mbr2gpt.

I tried several times to convert my laptop from MBR to GPT using TI2020 (both Linux and WinPE versions) from a .tibx backup to no avail.

Then I restored my drive as MBR and used the mbr2gpt tool, changed my BIOS to UEFI only,  and it booted on the first try.