Converting MBR to GPT

[Hoff]

Hello!

I decided on fresh installing Win10. But a problem occurred:
Since the driver was on MBR and not GPT I cannot install Windows 10 on that partition. It complains about it being MBR and therefor cannot be installed on there.
I have deleted or formatted the partition again and again but it remains a MBR partition.

Is there a way to convert a partition to GPT for Linux? Will I have to erase both partitions of this drive to convert the whole drive?

Best regards Hoff

[hcvv]

It is the partitioining itself that is MBR or GPT, not a partition.

In other words, the MBR partition table is complete different from the GPT partition table. So when you want to use GPT on a disk instead of an already existing MBR, all will be new and have new places. Which means that when you still have file systems with data you want to keep on existing partitions on the MBR disk, you first must save those for later restore.

[Hoff]

@hcvv

It is the partitioining itself that is MBR or GPT, not a partition.

In other words, the MBR partition table is complete different from the GPT partition table. So when you want to use GPT on a disk instead of an already existing MBR, all will be new and have new places. Which means that when you still have file systems with data you want to keep on existing partitions on the MBR disk, you first must save those for later restore.

Thank you for your reply!
I was afraid of that. Had been hoping to get windows in somehow and then use mbr2gpt. that’d been a life saver. Just wondered if there was something similar for Linux really.

[hcvv]

I do not know about mbr2gpt, but I can imagine that a more or less program assisted conversion is possible with restrictions. E.g. when you have no free space on the disk (all used up by partitions), there must be human intervention what to do because the GPT takes more space then the MBR table and the GPT schema also places a copy of the table at the end of the disk. So something must be shrunken.