MBR to GPT Questions

Brian,

I haven't done the conversion on a drive with a lot of data on it, but I don't think it should take very long (probably a matter of seconds). Note that there does need to be some free space available or it will fail.

I wouldn't recommend interrupting the process as it might cause data loss.

It's recommended to have a current Entire Disk Image of the drive before making partitioning changes (just in case anything goes wrong). At the very least, make sure to back up any important files.

how much space should be available for the conversion? There is about 50GB free on the drive. Is there any type of recovery built into acronis to continue the process if canceled/interrupted?

also, what does "fail" mean...does this mean that the drive would become corrupted?

Is there any information about how acronis technically does the conversion and what problems would arise?

So is this issue a known bug? From what i can tell, acronis does not support greater than 2TB drives without bugging out. The conversion did stop right in the middle, didn't go any farther (after a day), so i ended up loosing ALL of the data on the drive. My recommendation is to do a bit more testing before releasing these bugs on the unsuspecting customer. I or my clients will no longer rely on Acronis.

It just needs a small amount (128MB). It will resize a partition, if necessary.

There is no recovery method in place to continue an operation if it's canceled or interrupted.

As far as I know, fail means that the operation will abort (in the case of no space) and the drive won't be converted.

From the help file: Note: A GPT-partitioned disk reserves the space at the end of the partitioned area necessary for the backup area, which stores copies of the GPT header and the partition table. If the disk is full and the volume size cannot be automatically decreased, the conversion of the MBR disk to GPT will fail.

The conversion itself is not really that complicated (in a data moving sense). The reason that a backup is recommended is that when making partitioning changes it's possible that data loss can occur if anything goes wrong. This can happen regardless of the software being used. I don't have access to the actual process Acronis is using, but I assume it's fairly standard since the desired result is a known standard: The MBR is changed, Track 0 is changed, existing partitions are placed into the GPT partition table, the first partition is resized smaller to make room for the 128MB GPT Entry, Logical partitions are converted to Primary.