Convert Partition To Vhd

[Adriene]

GUIDPartition Table (GPT) takes advantage of UEFI BIOS to support storage devices larger than 2TB and lets you set up as many partitions as you need (Microsoft Windows supports up to 128 partitions on a GPT drive). The Windows 10, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 operating systems can use the UEFI BIOS, which can speed up boot and shutdown times and provides additional security advantages. To boot your computer in UEFI mode, you must use a drive formatted using the GPT drive format.

Windows 10, Windows 8, and 8.1 operating systems on Dell computers that were downgraded to Microsoft Windows 7 at the factory were shipped with the hard drive set to Master Boot Record (MBR) format. If you are upgrading your computer to Windows 10, Windows 8, and 8.1, it is recommended you convert the hard drive to GPT format.

Master Boot Record (MBR) disks use the standard BIOS partition table. GUID partition table (GPT) disks use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). One advantage of GPT disks is that you can have more than four partitions on each disk. GPT is also required for disks larger than 2 terabytes (TB).

As an alternate approach, you can use the MBR2GPT.EXE tool to convert the MBR disk to the GPT partition format. Keep in mind that the tool can be more complicated to use than the diskpart process. For details, see Convert MBR partition to GPT.

I have a disk with extended partition, and are all used. Now, I want to convert this disk to GPT. But GPT does not support extended partition. I wonder if it would be possible? Or maybe the extended partitions will automatically been converted into a primary one under GPT? I have to tried. I don't want to lose my data.

Thanks @Gizmo, but you did not answer my question directly :) I wanted to know if after converting MBR partition to GPT, the logical volumes in the extended partition can still be used as the used to be.

I did some experiment, and gdisk is able to convert the logical volumes into primary partitions, and retain the old logical volume number, which mean any application that refer to the old logical volume can still use the same partition number to access the new primary partition.

I'm just going on the available tools, not experience or documentation. You might want to test this with a partition (even just an image) you don't mind losing if it all goes wrong. Don't attempt this without taking a backup.

I did this using a system with multiboot distros (Ubuntu on ext4, Xubuntu on btrfs). Running Ubuntu, I have taken the Xubuntu btrfs home partition, and archived it using fsarchiver. I was then able to restore it, again using fsarchiver, to a different partition and specify ext4 filesystem type. That seemed to work okay.

Still in Ubuntu, I mounted the Xubuntu root partition on /mnt, and edited /mnt/@/etc/fstab to change the mount for /home to point to the new ext4 partition, changing both the UUID and the fs type, and deleting the subvolume data. I saved the file, and rebooted into Xubuntu.

I then pressed ctrl-D to continue booting, and Xubuntu continued booting and everything came up fine. I haven't done it yet, as I'm still on this initial boot, but I'm certain I could put that bind command in my fstab file. Or perhaps I could have left the subvolume info in the fstab entry, I don't know.

What I will do instead, however (this is off-topic), is take a more mature instance of a /home (ext4) partition for Xubuntu from another computer and use that instead. I've already proven that this will work.

**The solution that works in all cases, is of course to copy everything from the root partition to a directory on another partition (assuming you have one with enough free space), reformat / as ext4, copy back. I just did that, and hit a few issues so I thought I'd write a little howto:

I have my OSs in separate drives, so that GRUB2 wont' get replaced by the Windows Bootloader and viceversa, as I said both OSs boot fine on their own, but to do that I have to disconnect one drive in this case the Ubuntu drive as it prevents Windows from loading.

A firmware interface is the way that the firmware (the software inside devices) and operating system interact. It initialises the hardware then runsthe operating system and ensures that the operating system drivers can operate the hardware.

The BIOS has been the usual firmware interface that has been used. The UEFI isa newer interface that has several features, such as being faster, having a GUIand being able to start the network card and get an ip address. UEFI replacesEFI. (Those developing EFI saw that there were others doing something similarand so joined them, bringing the ideas of EFI with them. This then became UEFI).

To install GRUB onto a disk with a MBR, GRUB places a small program in the MBR toload the rest of GRUB from another part of the disk. (This is done because theMBR is too small to contain all of GRUB). The space that is chosen is spacebetween the MBR and the first partition, which usually exists.

GPT is a standard for how the partitons are specified. It does have a 'protective'MBR, however this is only for allowing BIOS based computers to boot and stoptools that only know about MBR from trying to trash GPT. It can have

When dealing with GPT disks, we need to use a GPT aware program. 'GPT fdisk' isa good tool to use and what I will be using. It can be called gptfdisk orgdisk depending on distribution (Ubuntu calles it gdisk). Parted (and Gparted)is also GPT aware, so can 'safely' be used with GPT disks.

Use parted (command line) or gparted (GUI) to resize the first and lastpartition. The first partion should have about 200MiB before it, and the lastpartition should have 1MiB to 2MiB (either will do) taken off the end.

Now add a new partition, making it of type 'EFI system'. It should find the freespace at the beginning (I suggest some low sector number like 34) andautomatically use all the free space.The examples use a 4GB USB flash drive with 1 partition already on there, resizedas per above.

One of the nice things about UEFI is that you should no longer need to worry about Windows overwriting GRUB; they should both coexist nicely on the EFI partition. One option would therefore be to switch to grub-efi. Note: I'm unsure whether grub-efi understands MSDOS-style partitions; I think it does. If it does not, this will fail to boot, and you'll need a LiveCD to recover. In fact, have a LiveCD handy anyway!

: More detail for this step: You'll need to find what the Linux kernel calls your EFI system partition. This will be something like /dev/sda2, /dev/sdb3, or such. You'll then need to make the /boot/efi directory, and add a line to /etc/fstab. If your EFI partition is /dev/sdb3, then you would add the following line:

: Since you've got multiple hard drives it might be a good idea to find out the UUID of the partition, as that will be stable under addition/removal of harddrives whereas the /dev/sda2 name is not guaranteed not to change. This can be done after you've finished setting everything else up, though.

You don't have to convert MBR to GPT to do UEFI booting, just create a primary FAT partition, install the grub-efi-amd64-bin package and follow the instructions in Add an ESP to an existing installation with MBR which should work with current releases of Ubuntu.

To complement Portablejim's answer (which really helped me for converting from MBR to GPT, thanks !), you can use Boot-Repair to reinstall grub. It worked like a charm to repair my boot after I failed to complete step 3, and once again when the installation of Windows 10 made the linux boot option disappear.

I have an MBR partition which I want to convert to GPT without loosing all my data. Bios is UEFI. I am not an expert of hard disks, so please be patient. I have seen this and this but I cannot understand if I can apply those procedures without erasing all my files, since the partition has only 2048 free sectors before the beginning of data. This is my partition:

The conversion from MBR to GPT pertains to a disk, not a partition:"Master Boot Record (MBR) disks use the standard BIOS partition table. GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). One advantage of GPT disks is that you can have more than four partitions on each disk. GPT is also required for disks larger than two terabytes (TB)."(Microsoft - Convert an MBR disk into a GPT disk)

If your bootloader is on the same disk, there is a very good chance it will fail to boot. This is a much more involved process, so if that is the case... restore your MBR (remember to save the backupfile), and you'd need to create an EFI BOOT partition (if I were you, I'd shrink down the swap and recreate it, to make some space - 500MB or so for the EFI boot partition), and make sure you get the installer on it. Make sure you boot from an UEFI boot media, or it would be tough to install grub in UEFI mode.

Backing up the full 2048 sectors is what saved my system when this conversion failed. I tried restoring just the first 512 bytes, but the left over GPT bits seemed to render the system unbootable for some reason. Restoring everything prior to the first partition recovered the system.

Well just pull out your recent, high quality backup and format the drive and start over. Based on previous experience, 3rd party converters are hit and MISS. Unless someone can post one that is reliable and not priced through the roof.

A disk clone will result in a second copy of a dynamic disk, but what if you attach a second virtual disk of the same size, initialize it the way you need, and clone just the partition? That may work, I believe.

I then copied the SD card on my Mac to a two.img file using dd. (The resulting two.img file was 15GB, the size of the SD card). To check the img file, I flashed the file back to the SD card using Etcher and verified that I was able to boot the SD card on the Pi and see my filesystem change.

3a8082e126