Recovery of a GPT Disk Backup to a MBR Disk

To my knowledtge, no.  ATIH does support converting GPT to MBR and vice versa, but on non-bootable drives.  However, Enchantech has posted success going from MBR to GPT with a small work-round:

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/100560

Might be worth a shot.  

Why would you want to go from UEFI/GPT back to the older MBR/legacy/CSM install if your computer bios supports UEFI and GPT booting?

Thanks, I'll check out Enchantech's post and see if I can get any insights (although I'm trying to go GPT->MBR rather than vice-versa).

I would prefer to stick with UEFI/GPT, but I need (it's a long story) to be able to independently, and without virtual machine(s), boot all of Win 10, 7, and XP from this drive. I knew XP was going to be problematic, but I'm astonished to learn that apparently even Windows 7 Home 64-bit cannot be installed to a GPT disk! In any case, my only option for this multi-boot configuration seems to be conversion of the GPT drive to MBR.

Have you considered using a utility program like Oracle VM VirtualBox and creating your Windows 7 and XP machines as virtual machines that run within Windows 10 which would remove the need to switch from GPT to MBR?

Hi Steve,

As per my previous reply, at this point the spec is to run these OS's completely natively, avoiding any overhead associated with the virtual machine simulations. As I understand it, any slowdown associated with going from GPT to MBR would be negligible in comparison.

OK, understood.  There would be some degradation with using VMs but given you have 12GB of RAM coupled with a powerful processor that might offset loosing the ability to upgrade your HDD from 1TB to over 3TB in the future which GPT would allow but MBR limit you to 2TB.

One other thought is the limitation of paritions with MBR.  I think you might find yourself capped as Windows can only allow a maximum of four patitions to be found on an MBR disk.  I'm not sure if that would apply to 4 partitions within each version of Windows, or 4 paritions total on the drvie though - I have not tried to create multiple OS wiht multiple partitions.  You might be OK though, assuming one MBR that has the boot informaiton for all OS installs, +1 for XP, +1 for Win 7 + 1 for Win 10.  There could be no recovery partitions and/or MSR partitions as well though and I'm assuming the 1MBR would be usable for each of the installed OS's.

Bobbo, the limitation of 4 partitions for MBR drives is purely for Physical partitions, you can have many more by creating an Extended Partition which in turn holds multiple Logical partitions.  I have a similar setup on my laptop which dual-boots between Vista 32bit (the original OS) and Windows 10 64bit (my default OS), plus I have a further 5 logical partitions.

Steve, Bobbo,

I acknowledge the irritation of being limited to 4 actual partitions in MBR, but that is enough for my situation. I'm not particularly worried about the recovery or other Microsoft-reserved partitions (that's why I have ATI2016!). I'm mainly just trying to avoid a re-installation of Win10 and apps on my (currently GPT) hard drive.

Thanks Steve, but none of of your logical paritions from your extended drives are "bootable" right?  I'm just thinking that with 3 OS installed on a single MBR disk, you'd have at least 4 primary paritions (MBR =1, XP = 1, Win7 =1, Win 10=1), which would max out the necesrrary partions and not allow for any additional extended extended or logical paritions... even so , my understanding was that extedned disks/logical paritions were not bootable.  It's been awhile since i've had a dual boot hard drive (thanks to VM's) so I'm a bit rusty on this and can't remember if each OS needs it's own primary MBR parition as well, or if they all share the same one (which is what I'm thinking they would do).  If they share the same MBR, then having 3 bootable OS's should be doable, but that would be the maximum.

True Image does not support conversion of GPT to MBR.  Conversion of MBR to GPT is supported with limitations.  See the link below for more details when recovery is to a disk of less than 2TB in size.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#1…

For disks larger than 2TB look here:

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#1…

For an understanding of partition scheme layout and OS support look here:

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#1…

Bobbo, just to clarify, you can boot from Logical partitions, that is the case with my laptop, Vista is on a Physical along with a Dell Diags and a Recovery partition, then Windows 10 is booted from the first Logical in my Extended partition.

Thanks for clarifying Steve.  I had never tried booting from an extended/logical parition and was under the impression that booting was not supported on them.  So as long as there are no more than 4 physical paritions - one of which would need to be an extended one (usually at the physical end of the drive).  You can create multiple paritions on the extended paritition, to inlcude multiple OS installs in that extended parition.  

All,

Thanks for your responses thus far. I've re-examined the ATI2016 documentation, and it only seems to address the MBR->GPT conversion (as seen in the links posted by Enchantech), and does not, as far as I can see, explicitly rule out the reverse. In any case, without some solid reassurance that it is possible, I'm certainly not going to reformat my existing hard drive to MBR and then simply hope that I can get ATI2016 to recover my Win10 backup to it. I have another 1TB hard drive arriving in a few days, onto which I will clone my existing GPT drive, leaving me free to experiment.

In the meantime, let me modify the scenario somewhat. Lets say I have used ATI2016 to make an Entire PC backup of an MBR hard drive from an old computer, consisting of a single partition with WinXP and various apps/data. Then, I reformat a different GPT hard drive and convert it to MBR, and do a clean install of Win10 onto it, along with ATI2016. Finally, I shrink the Win10 partition down to some appropriate size, and convert the unallocated space into a new empty partition.

My question is, at that point, can I connect a USB flash drive containing the above WinXP backup, then run ATI2016 from the MBR (formerly GPT) hard drive, and have it restore this XP backup to the new, empty partition I just created on the hard drive? And if so, will it be bootable, without interfering with the boot capability of the existing Win10 partition (i.e., does this produce a functional dual-boot system)? As I interpret the ATI2016 documentation, this should work, but I'm too new with this application to be sure. Thanks for any feedback-

Hmm, we may need to take a step back here with your modified scenario....

If you take an entire PC backup of a Win XP system plus all apps / data...  and want to move this to completely different / new hardware then you have more issues than just converting from GPT to MBR before you can get your WinXP to boot on the new computer.

You would need to use Universal Restore in order to perform this type of system migration to new hardware, you would need to provide all device drivers needed by WinXP to work with the new hardware in the new computer, you would also need to hold a full Retail Microsoft Windows XP license to allow that OS to be activated on the new computer system.  This is not as simple of taking a backup then restoring it and hoping it will boot.

Yes, you could simply restore the WinXP backup to the new MBR drive in the new computer but the chances of it booting are very low, especially if the BIOS used on the old and new computers are radically different, i.e. legacy BIOS in the old and UEFI / GPT BIOS in the new, not to mention new hardware components that XP has no clue how to operate with.

If you are getting a spare 1TB hard drive, then you could try installing Windows XP directly from the Microsoft provided CD to see if it would allow it to be installed in the first place.  Dual-booting Win XP with Windows 10 is certainly possible and if you have already been running Windows 10 on this same computer, then you could also test the dual-boot scenario by doing a clean install of 10 as this OS is licensed to the hardware it is installed on.

Note: If you have an OEM Windows XP license then this is not intended to be used on any system than the original computer it was installed on.

Thanks for your reply Steve, these are some tricky issues.

The transfer of XP would be from an old Dell to a newer one. According to Dell support, the Win7 device drivers for my newer machine (which I've already downloaded from Dell) can be installed to a WinXP partition and be fully functional on the new machine (we'll see). Regarding the BIOS, the old one is unquestionably more primitive (although both are Phoenix products). The new (UEFI/GPT) BIOS does have an "Enable legacy BIOS" option, and I am presuming (hoping) that is sufficient.

Activation could be problematic. The XP installation discs are from an era before product keys were tied to a specific motherboard/firmware. As such it's not clear why it wouldn't activate. Indeed, it previously resided on a long ago scrapped dinosaur system, and there was no problem activating it after transferring it to this (merely ancient) Dell, which itself is now on life support, and staring at the abyss. :)

Sunmesa,

I think you are going about this wrong.  You would be much better off clean installing all 3 OS versions on your drive to seperate partitions and using EasyBCD to manage the boot to them.  I am including a link that will provide all the necessary info for doing this and hopefully it will get you where you want to go. 

http://www.pagestart.com/win7heptaboot01.html

There are a total of 9 pages in the above linked article.  At the bottom of each page is a link to the next page.  Read and follow them all.

After you get it all setup then create a full disk backup with True Image so that if necessary you will have a backup of copy of the end result.

Hi Enchantech,

I was already familiar with the link you provided (Page Start Dual Boot Korner and associated links), and in fact it's what inspired me to acquire ATI2016 in the first place!

If all I was starting with was the installation disks for the three OS's in question (Win XP, 7, & 10), I wouldn't be bothering the forum with this issue. What I have is (1) a fairly new GPT hard drive with OEM Win10_64 installed (including a fair amount of apps, data, and system tweaks, which would be nice to preserve); (2) a retail Win7_64 installation CD; and, (3) an older MBR hard drive with WinXP_32, including a gazillion apps, data, and system tweaks, which I would be loath to try to reinstall/reproduce. So, my mission was to get all of these intact onto the newer hard drive, and have all of them be bootable.

I have no need for additional operating systems (at this point), so there was no need to bother with the extended partition procedure discussed in the Page Start 'heptaboot' link. So, proceeding in baby steps, I simply (a) made an ATI2016 backup of the GPT hard drive; (b) reduced the partition size on the GPT drive, and created a new empty partition on it; (c) booted to the Win7 installation CD, and told it to install to the new empty partition.

At this point the Win7_64 installer says (in effect) "nope, sorry, can't install to this partition, because it's GPT formatted". That rather surprised me (64-bit Win7 won't install to a UEFI/GPT drive?!), but I said, ok, I'll reformat this GPT disk to MBR and start over. Now we come to the point of this whole thread: my hope was that I could use ATI2016 to recover intact the previous Win10 backup to the now MBR (formerly GPT)-formatted drive, such that it is still bootable in the MBR context. You've indicated that ATI2016 does not support such a migration, and I'm convinced that's correct (although, again, the documentation does not make that obvious).

So, as mentioned previously, my plan now is to make an ATI2016 clone of my existing GPT to a brand new hard drive, reformat the old one to MBR, and try, one by one, to install Win10, 7, and XP onto it, using essentially the procedure described in the Page Start link, but without the extended partition.

What still remains unclear is whether I can do the following: make an ATI2016 Entire PC backup of my old WinXP drive, and later restore it, intact and bootable, to a dedicated partition on the new MBR-formatted drive (assuming I can provide all the required new drivers and get XP to activate). Any thoughts on this? Thanks-

SunMesa, Win 7 can be installed to UEFI/GPT (XP won't though).  You have to make sure that when you boot to the Windows installer, it is booting to the UEFI mode though.  If your system has both UEFI and CSM legacy mode, you can either try disaling legacy mode to force the installer in UEFI mode.  Alternatively, press your boot override button at reboot (F12 for Dells, Esc or F1 for HP and others - usually).  Then make sure to select the UEFI USB or UEFI CD option and Windows 7 should install to a GPT disk in UEFI mode.

I think that having XP will require your to use MBR for all installs though if the plan is to have all 3 OS on one disk. 

There should be no reason that you couldn't backup and restore XP in the same manner as Win 7/8/8.1/10 as long as they are all MBR/BIOS installs - which is what you're currently attempting to do.

Unfortunately, if I now understand correctly, each OS install still requires it's own MBR parition (not a shared one) which would mean a minimum of 6 of them... requiring an extended partition with logistical paritions to accomodate the number beyond 4.  

Steve or Enchantech can probalby weigh in on that part a bit more as I've never actually needed to/or tried to install so many OS's on an MBR formatted disk.

Bobbo is correct in his assessment of the situation you have.  Further, I think you are not going to be successful in attempting to have 3 separate MBR boot partitions on the same disk.  It is possible to have multiple OS installs on the same disk but those installs need to be booted from the same MBR partition and Windows has a bad track record at doing that successfully hence the use of EasyBCD.

It is possible on an MBR disk to have the MBR partition included in the Primary OS partition but I am not sure that would help here and it certainly will not help in a multiboot system. 

I am not a multiboot fan at least not from the same disk.  I have and run a multiboot system however that system uses independent disks for each OS install.  I am not sure of your reasoning or need to multiboot the 3 OS's you have chosen but I can say that I do firmly believe that without fresh installs of each OS you are just asking for trouble.  Just my opinion.

Bobbo, Enchantech, from my own experience it is possible to have multiple OS's on a single hard drive by using separate partitions for each OS - I have done this myself with upto 3 different OS's.  There obviously needs to be at least 1 physical partition though this can be upto 3 physicals plus an Extended partition which will host further logical partitions.

When mixing with older OS's such as XP or Vista, the BCD needed by Vista, 7 or later will be stored on the first physical partition, i.e. if XP is first, on that partition.  There will be no System Reserved partition in that case. which is the same for my Dell Studio laptop which has both Vista and Windows 10 installed without that 200MB partition being present.  Windows 10 runs from a logical partition.

If SumMesa is going to replicate his original UEFI / GPT Windows 10 system installation on a blank MBR drive by restoring an image of the GPT drive to the MBR drive, assuming that this will work, then this will have both the System Reserved plus the Windows 10 partition.

From that point forward, the biggest challenge I see would be in restoring the Windows XP backup image to the new system, this to my mind would require using Universal Restore because of the obvious hardware differences between the very old XP system and the new computer.  One key point here is the need to omit restoring the old XP MBR to the new system, then using such as EasyBCD to add in the XP system to the Windows 10 boot menu.

If the above can be done and is successful, then adding Windows 7 as a new install from the original DVD should be straight forward once space is made for a partition to hold this OS.

Hi Bobbo,

You're absolutely right, Win7 does install to my UEFI/GPT disk! It took an extra step or two, though.

Previously, I had done basically as you described, simply selecting the UEFI DVD/CD as the boot drive in Setup. In this configuration, it would not boot from the CD at all. I even tried removing the other options/devices (Microsoft Boot Manager and the hard drive) from the boot sequence list, that didn't help either... trying to boot just sent it into a Dell diagnostic mode, which reported that no bootable devices were found.

I then tried enabling the Legacy BIOS mode, and selected the CD as a non-UEFI device, and it booted up just fine and began installing Win7. However, the installer ultimately gagged when I selected the desired partition, saying "Sorry, that's a GPT partition".

The proper boot setup turned out to be something in-between... you must first turn off Secure Boot, then "Enable Legacy ROMs", then select the DVD/CD as a UEFI device, not as a legacy device. In that configuration, Win7 installed to the desired partition just fine. It's not clear why Secure Boot had to be disabled, since it's an absolutely original retail Win7 installation CD, presumably including the Microsoft digital signatures. Whatever, it worked... thanks for motivating me to do additional tweaks in Setup mode.

This obviously doesn't solve my issues with getting WinXP on board, but it's certainly progress. I will back up and clone this new configuration when I get the new hard drive, since in the long term I wont be needing WinXP or MBR.

You may be right (I hope not) about each OS on an MBR disk needing its own dedicated MBR partition. However, when I do Disk Management on my MBR-formatted XP drive, I see only a single, contiguous partition (C:) that takes up the entire drive. I had thought that the MBR data was in a hidden, dedicated section of the drive, and that it effectively governed over all partitions on the drive. But I'm certainly no authority!

The MBR data is actually very small and lives in the very first portion of the first partition as described in the link below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record 

There is only ever one copy of the MBR regardless of how many partitions or OS's are present.

I have had the mispleasure of building a number of multiboot machines.  You can get them to work but ulitmaely they always fail sooner or later.  It is one thing to clean install multiple OS's on the same disk but quite another to attempt to restore a backup images of OS's to the same disk.  What I see is in the OP's next step at running a recovery of the XP backup to the drive it will fail because of the GPT issue.  I also think that even with a MBR formatted disk it would fail as I would expect the XP restore to overwrite the MBR with just the one from XP.  It has been my experience and probably can be found on the net that XP must be present on the disk first followed by remaining OS's or boot is impossible.

EDIT: Taken from the Microsoft website:

Warning

• You must install the older operating system first, and then install the more recent operating system. If you don't (for example, if you install Windows Vista on a computer already running Windows 7), you can render your system inoperable. This can happen because earlier versions of Windows don't recognize the startup files used in more recent versions of Windows and can overwrite them.

I totally agree with Enchantech. I used to be the king of mutli-boot systems. At one point I had fourteen systems booting from one disk including various Windows and Linux systems. Linux was so difficult to configure as a desktop (X-Windows) system I could not stand to discard one system when it was time to try another system.

One day I woke up and decided to adopt a "one disk one system" approach. I switched to using an internal drive caddy with swappable draws. It works great. Each draw has a separate disk with one system installed. To change systems I shut down, swap a draw and enter the BIOS to set the new disk as bootable. My life has been much simpler. I ultimately decided Linux had no place as a desktop workstation and currently use only Windows systems. 

Thanks to all for the additional comments. Some of this discussion may be straying off topic... my fundamental question at the moment continues to be: can I restore an ATI  Entire PC backup of my current WinXP system to a new MBR-formatted hard drive, and have it remain intact (apps/data/etc) and bootable? No one has quite come out and said yes or no, so I assume this has yet to be determined. I'll try it and let you know how it works out.

In regard to the comment about the installation order of multiple OS's, that can certainly be accommodated... if XP insists on being first, that's fine, the idea is just to get them all on the same drive, all independently and natively bootable, and all able read/write to the other partitions in real time.

As to the wisdom or perils of multibooting in general, we should probably defer that to another thread. Suffice it to say, it's a customer spec in this case, but one which I think is well motivated. This is a situation in which a number of legacy Fortran codes (having been bricked by 'upgraded' runtime libraries in Visual Studio) need to be exercised in, and ultimately rescued from, their native development environments. They include fairly intensive codes processing large numbers of random trials. This is not well-suited to a virtual machine simulation.

If it were up to me, all of these codes would be launched from a bare-bones Linux shell, but it's not my call. Frankly, Windows 10 is much better suited to a smartphone than a scientific computing environment, but I'm forced to deal with it, and its predecessors, for some time to come.

A footnote: after additional googling, it appears that it actually is possible to install XP to a GPT disk, essentially by commandeering the 'fake' MBR that resides in the EFI partition, resulting in a 'hybrid' disk. It's strictly for hardcore geeks, and even they don't recommend it, but apparently it's possible in principle. A little too intimidating for me, I'll stick with the conventional MBR route.

Yes, you should have no problem imaging XP and restoring it to an MBR disk - same process and procedures as Win 7/8/8.1 and 10.  If done correctly (which is sounds like you already know how to do), everything will be just as it was on the original image.   You should have no issue with that, especially when keeping to the basics if just restoring one OS to a drive. The rest, we'll leave up to you with the multiboot operations, but sounds like you have a pretty good background in this already so I'm sure you'll get it sorted out. 

The answer to your original question is no. Here's what will happen. If you boot the TI recovery media in UEFI mode, TI will convert the disk back to GPT before restoring it. If you boot the TI recovery media in non-UEFI mode, the disk will remain MBR. Howerver, the restored disk will not be bootable.

If you want to convert a UEFI/GPT system to MBR look at AOMIE Partition Assistant Pro. It will do the conversion and the system will be bootable in non-UEFI mode.

I think there's still some confustion - just to clarify... Mustang is correct, if attempting to restore an UEFI build to MBR, no dice.  Hoewver, if you have an original MBR backup of n XP system, and as you mentioned, will be resoring to a newly formatted MBR drive, all will be well. 

I totally agree with Mustang.  That is precisely the message I trued to convey previously. What you want/need to do is not supported by True Image therefore you will need another product.

I think Bobbo has the correct scenario, and hopefully he is also correct that it will work. Again, I have abandoned the idea of restoration of a GPT backup to an MBR drive and hoping it will convert to MBR... I probably should have spawned a new thread. In any case, the current proposal is to:

(1) Create an ATI Entire PC backup (including apps/data/etc) of the XP system on the old MBR-formatted hard drive and store it on a USB flash drive;

(2) On a completely different computer, which has an MBR-formatted hard drive with a single empty partition, and the USB flash drive from (1) connected, boot from Live CD ATI and recover the Entire PC backup of the XP system to the empty partition on the new MBR-formatted hard drive.

Question: Assuming the appropriate drivers for the new machine are available and installed, will this recovered XP system boot and be otherwise intact?

Yes. You will need to use Universal Restore to inject the drivers for the new computer after restoring XP to the new disk. In the back of my mind, I seem to recall that the XP system will need to be on Service Pack 3 for UR to work.