Coverting MBR to GPT Software [ Edited ]

[minitrucker007]

I just got a 3TB drive and used acronis to clone my old 1.5TB drive. But it is still formatted MBR so I only have a 2TB partition and a 750GB unallocated partition. Is there a (preferably free) piece of software that I can use to convert the drive over to GPT then expand the 2TB partition to give me the whole piece of storage in one partition?

I would also like to not lose the data, took forever to copy 1.5TB worth of data.

[RoofingGuy]

I'd assume the "clone" would have made an exact copy, including the partition table.

As far as I can tell, you can only change empty drives from MBR to GPT.

Someone else may know of a utility, but as far as I can see, you'd have to wipe the 3TB again, making it GPT and then copy the 1.5's files to it.

[minitrucker007]

Ya that’s what I seem to be finding when searching the web.

That kind of **bleep**, took from noon yesterday till sometime last night to do the clone.

[ThePizzaMatrix]

Dude, I don't  mean to sound negative, but you're trying to accomplish something extremely difficult since you cloning an MBR partition to a drive that needs GPT (GUID) to work properly is extremely unlikely to have a good outcome.

You can leave the drive ready for a new partition table with any software that is able to write zeros, however, you'll still need to initialize the drive as GPT to have the 3TB, defeating what you want to do as you can't change the partition table without killing the data if you want your drive to be as a healthy, stable and clean as possible with GPT.

You can use GPT fdisk 0.7.1, it's free and will let you change the partition to GPT without killing the data but BE WARNED; not killing the data to create the clean partition table ENDS in an unstable and horribly performing drive.

I'd just forget about going the easy way (Cloning) if I were you and just copy the files from one drive to the other after loading the OS and the programs to the GPT drive to make sure it's going to work as it should. This is because if you're cloning an XP drive then as soon as you convert the drive to GPT it's going to lock-up and become unusable since XP doesn't support GPT and if you have Vista to W7 then they won't make use of GPT and ADV format on a clone as they need to be natively installed on a GPT drive to use the advantages, so either way you loose if you convert it.

[lexxx]

best way and the Only way is just plug both disks in and delete all partitions from the 3TB and make the drive GPT and Create the 3TB partition and copy all the data to it thats the clean way (asumeing XP / Vista / 7 64 bit only is used)

you have to copy all the data agane as there has to be no partitions on the disk when you convert the disk to GPT

it most likey taken long time as the new Green WD disks are 4k sectors Acron True Image most likey copyed the disk miss allinged,

i did the same mestake on my 2TB WD green disk as i use 2003 server (XP kernel) so it was Miss allinged so it was going to take 7-10 hrs to copy the disk was scraching my head why was the disk Que very high (hovering around 30) all the time and low Write speeds, i unpluged it pluged it into an windows 7 system made the parttiton and then pluged it back into my server disk was copying at normal rate taken less then 2-3 hrs i think to copy (DIsk Que was low some times would do 10 every so often but thats normal)