Making a hybrid Hard drive

I have a Mac Pro with 4 drives; 3 of the drives are standard Mac GPT drives; the fourth drive is an MBR drive, on which I have installed windows 7. Every thing (well, almost everything) is fine; both OS's, Mac and Windows can see, read, and write to all four drives, thanks to Paragon's file system drivers. The Mac's native EFI 1.1 based boot manager boots both MacOS and Windows 7 just fine.

For obscure reasons, I did not install Windows with Boot Camp - thus, it is a "pure" MBR partitioned drive, not a MBR/GPT hybrid. It is 1.5 TB in size.

Only one thing doesn't work - I would like to use my Parallels software to create a Macintosh OS virtual machine based on my Windows 7 installation. And Parallels seems to require a bootcamp-style hybrid partition scheme.

So, I would like to convert my Windows 7 MBR drive to a hybrid partition scheme, using Paragon HDM 12 professional. If I use the standard HDM tool to convert the drive from MBR to GPT, Paragon will convert the MBR partition table in to a protective MBR, and I would lose the ability to boot windows.

So, this is what I thought I'd try, and I wonder if anyone thinks it will or will not work:

1) Make a complete backup of the Windows drive (I've already done this, and in fact I had to restore it once, and it is a functional backup)
2) Use Paragon HDM (after booting from a WindowsPE Paragon rescue CD) to backup the MBR only of the Windows 7 drive
3) Use Paragon HDM to convert the drive to GPT. This will overwrite the existing MBR with a protective MBR
4) Use Paragon HDM to restore the original MBR. This should give me a so-called hybrid partitioned drive
5) If something goes wrong, I can restore the entire hard drive from my existing whole-drive backup archive

 

See https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=341703&highlight=MBR

 

Not good news - I am using a paid, licensed copy of Paragon, which I have paid annually to keep up to date. It is very disappointing that the company has not fixed seemingly simple bugs that they have known about for years.

I cannot use the Linux Paragon recovery disk, for some reason it will not boot on my Mac Pro. I'll therefore try backing up the MBR manually from a terminal window in Mac OS. This is from a web site www.amandpandit.blogspot.com I found via Google, and I think it will work:
MBR disks back up can be taken as below:

$ dd if=/dev/disk0 of=MBR bs=512 count=1

MBR header can be restored back as :

$ dd if=MBR of=/dev/disk0

I would then use either gdisk or Paragon just to convert my existing MBR to GPT. Probably gdisk - I'm losing faith in Paragon! (I'll have to change the disk designation to the correct macos designation for my Windows 7 disk, of course)

Thanks very much for the post! Best to learn the gotchas in advance. I will be sending a note to Paragon encouraging them to do some bug fixing....for what it's worth

 

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