MBR to GPT failure (Updated...again...and voila)
Greetings. I am attempting to clone my old 500GB boot drive to a new 1TB drive. The old drive is formatted with MBR, but I want the new one to be GPT. Unfortunately, despite documentation stating this is possible, I can't get ATI 2013 to perform the task. I'm always left with an MBR formatted drive. I format the 1TB drive in GPT successfully, but it is reverted to MBR after the cloning process.
System specs: Windows 7 x64 Pro and an ASRock Extreme 4 mobo that is UEFI enabled.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Update:
I discovered I had not chosen the UEFI option using the ATI rescue disc as my initial boot option. Once I changed that parameter, ATI was able to clone a new disk in the GPT format. Now, however, I can't get the clone to boot. All I get is a command prompt. Also, even though the new drive shows GPT, my UEFI setup tool doesn't show any UEFI boot options--only AHCI. Puzzling....
Second Update
Just in case someone stumbles by this post in the future, I was able to successfully move a smaller boot disk formated in MBR to a larger disk formated in GPT by doing the following:
Using Acronis, perform a full backup of your current boot drive (you will need a third drive for this). Then, using Acronis (or the OS, or whatever), format the new drive in GPT. Restart computer. In UEFI set up menu, choose to have the computer boot through UEFI to the W 7 install disc. Install W 7 on the on the new drive previously formated to GPT. After that is complete, boot back to the original boot drive and have Acronis recover the full backup to the new drive containing the freshly installed OS 7. After that, change your UEFI to boot from your new GPT drive with OS 7 and the backup installed and...voila. No muss, no fuss. Everything worked perfectly, no settings changed, no updates needed.
When told I can't do something I tend to gnash my teeth a bit. After looking around through a couple of Google searches I found that this type of transfer was quite easy and evidently many have done it this way, despite the advice here which was to not bother.
Mission accomplished and I hope this helps someone in the future.
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James is right. If you have Windows Vista or 7, then you can have an EFI boot to a GPT disk. But the boot files in such a configuration and the active partition Windows uses are different from an MBR set up.
I am not sure that the Windows installation disk could repair the boot configuration if you moved from one to the other. I tried to Google about that but I didn't fine anything useful.
If I were you I would do a fresh install after such a drastic change of configuration.
Or I would stay with an MBR disk. Unless you have a compelling reason to have more than four primary partitions on that disk, you don't need GPT.
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Thanks for the info. I think I'll keep the MBR for now and make the change when I next do a clean install.
Thanks again.
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