Skip to main content

Survival Kit Creating MBR Disk

Thread needs solution

Hi there,

I've been using a 3TB Seagate external drive for my backups. When I upgraded to 2019, I decided to let it wipe the drive and create a survival kit on it for easy restoration.

The problem is, it keeps making it an MBR disk, and thus limiting me to only 2TB of use. My system is UEFI enabled, and certainly never had problems with this disk as GPT before.

Any ideas how I can get the survival kit to make/keep this as a GPT drive so I can actually use all 3TB. If not, I guess I can just use a USB drive for recovery as before, though the survival kit seems like a nice feature.

Thanks!

0 Users found this helpful

The survival kit uses the boot mode of the host system to create itself.  Therefore, if your system boots via Legacy/MBR the feature created will be built as a Legacy/MBR device.  Systems that boot via UEFI/GPT will yield a like survival kit.

You can create an additional partition on the disk to make use of the remaining space.

Thanks for the reply. I guess there's no way to force it to be UEFI without wiping my Windows drive?

I can't actually create another partition on that drive. Windows won't let me.

 

Attachment Size
460140-151809.JPG 53.2 KB

Hmmm, I admit I have not tried to create a survival kit on a Legacy system.  There was a good discussion during the beta testing from which I drew my answer here.  I suspect that an attribute has been set on the drive to prevent further formatting.

You might try temporarily disabling Active Protection and see if doing so will then allow you to create anther partition on the disk.  Other than that I have no idea.

There is no way to as you say "force" the kit to be UEFI.  UEFI is an abbreviation for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, it is a standard not something you turn of or on.

If you are using Windows 10 and have upgraded to one of the Creators Editions there is a tool in those version known as MBR2GPT which will allow you to convert your MBR disk to GPT without data loss at which point you can enable UEFI boot.  For details on how it works look HERE

Enchantech wrote:

If you are using Windows 10 and have upgraded to one of the Creators Editions there is a tool in those version known as MBR2GPT which will allow you to convert your MBR disk to GPT without data loss at which point you can enable UEFI boot.  For details on how it works look HERE

I have done this on 2 PCs and it took just a few minutes.

Ian 

frestogaslorastaswastavewroviwroclolacorashibushurutraciwrubrishabenichikucrijorejenufrilomuwrigaslowrikejawrachosleratiswurelaseriprouobrunoviswosuthitribrepakotritopislivadrauibretisetewrapenuwrapi
Posts: 250
Comments: 7092

Only wanted to add that we'll add a warning in the upcoming update alerting about conversion from GPT to MBR in case the system is running in BIOS mode.