I own HDM15 Suite. I just finished a clean install of Win10 on my laptop on an SSD. After spending time customizing Win10 and installing all my apps I noticed that the SSD I used is configured as MBR as that’s how it was formatted prior to the Win10 installation. My previous Win8.1 installation on another SSD is GPT formatted and boots faster and works with the laptop's UEFI BIOS boot setting. Is there a relatively painless method of converting this installation to GPT (UEFI)? Can I somehow use an HDM15 backup to restore to GPT when it was created from an MBR disk? Or is there some other tool in HDM15 that could be used? I could just start again from scratch. But it would be great if I can avoid losing the time I've spent getting this installation tweaked to my liking. Thanks for any help with this and happy holidays to all Russell
I've "heard" that there is a way to convert MBR to GPT without data loss but you need to purchase special software.
It´s not possible to convert, AFAIK. Check that your firmware is UEFI-based, backup your information, wipe the SSD, and start the installation again. To wipe the disk, diskpart select disk 0 clean exit
There are several tools that theoretically allow conversion from MBR to GPT. Paragon HDM 15, AOMEI Partition Assistant and Minitool Partition Wizard are three of them. Paragon HDM [working from a boot UFD] warns that after the conversion the OS may not boot. Partition Wizard doesn´t allow the conversion for system disks. Partition Assistant only instructs the user to change to UEFI the boot mode in the firmware configuration after the conversion. I dont´know how reliable these tools are, but it would be easy to try them. Not having enough information, my first choice would be the traditional method. Edit: There is another procedure here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1eXD30Fox4 [the music is good].
Before I try what's been suggested I'm wondering if the following might work: 1) Back up the current Win10 drive using HDM15 2) Clean the drive using Diskpart 3) Remount the drive as a GPT disk. 4) Use the USB media to install Win10 which I assume will also create the necessary UEFI partitions on the GPT drive. 5) Use HSM15 to restore and overwrite the C partition using the backup made in step 1. Might this work? Russell
I've successfully completed steps 1-4 and now have Win10 on a GPT drive booting via UEFI. The install added the 2 small UEFI partitions plus the 3d partition is where Win10 is installed. I'll do a backup of this before trying to restore the Win10 install from the MBR backup. But I'm still wondering if anyone knows if it will or will not work?
I don´t think step 5) will work. The purpose of creating the backup in step 1) is to go back to MBR if something goes wrong. You need to configure Windows and re-install all the applications in the UEFI installation.
I've read elsewhere that a repair using the install medium would fix the UEFI boot problem. But once I had the OS installed on the GPT disk I just kept going and installed everything. All's good - the OS boots in about 15 seconds, which is very similar to what it was with Win 8.1. I'm just wondering how long it'll be before I return to using Windows 8.1. So far I'm rather underwhelmed with few new advantages (don't have a touch screen) and many app's compatibility setting need to be set to "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" to resolve fuzzy menu texts when the system font is set to120% (I prefer a larger system font).