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Converting GPT partition to MBR for Vista

When you arrive home from a conference (which you were, of course, smart enough to bring your Mac to), and find that your Windows laptop won’t boot because in the process of doing absolutely nothing while you were away, the hard disk failed catastrophically (grr-click, grr-click, type fail), and the other disks you have laying around all are formatted with GPT partitions, which the windows installer fails to recognize…you need to:

  1. Enter the repair console in the Vista boot disk
  2. type “diskpart” to enter the partition utility
  3. type “Sel disk 0″ to select the main drive in the laptop
  4. type “clean”
  5. type “exit” and try again with the installer and it will work.

I actually needed to do quite a few more things, mainly involving Google and writing run on sentences in my blog — but you get the idea.

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Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Converting GPT partition to MBR for Vista”

  1. Holy crap Says:
    January 23rd, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    NO NO NO! This will wipe the entire HDD – NOT just the partition. I lost data because of this.

  2. greg Says:
    January 26th, 2009 at 9:04 pm

    Well, that’s to be expected, yes. There’s not way to change a disk partition structure without wiping.

  3. Ken Emerson Says:
    February 25th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    Why not: window key-r
    diskpart
    list disk
    sel disk 0
    convert mbr
    ?

  4. Will Says:
    March 11th, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    I tried Ken Emerson’s suggestion. No luck. Requests an empty GPT disk before it will convert. My drive is too big for me to back it up to another location before I wipe it. has anyone figured out how to do this without losing the data??? Or is it even possible?

  5. Frans Says:
    March 25th, 2009 at 10:53 pm

    The only way I have found to preserve the data is to borrow to a large disk from a friend.

  6. Jack Ayre Says:
    June 15th, 2009 at 12:18 pm

    Greg,

    I replaced my MacBook Pro with HP Pavilion dv7. I want to use on the HP, the external WD backup, 1 terabyte external drive used for “Time Zone.” My HP laptop see the drive as:

    Description Disk drive
    Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
    Model WD 10EACS External USB Device
    Bytes/Sector 512
    Media Loaded Yes
    Media Type Removable media
    Partitions 2
    SCSI Bus Not Available
    SCSI Logical Unit Not Available
    SCSI Port Not Available
    SCSI Target ID Not Available
    Sectors/Track 63
    Size 931.51 GB (1,000,202,273,280 bytes)
    Total Cylinders 121,601
    Total Sectors 1,953,520,065
    Total Tracks 31,008,255
    Tracks/Cylinder 255
    Partition Disk #2, Partition #0
    Partition Size 200.00 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
    Partition Starting Offset 20,480 bytes
    Partition Disk #2, Partition #1
    Partition Size 931.19 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)
    Partition Starting Offset 209,735,680 bytes

    The HP names it Drive G and will not address it. HP believes it to have removable media. I’m running:

    windir %SystemRoot%
    USERNAME SYSTEM
    TRACE_FORMAT_SEARCH_PATH \\NTREL202.ntdev.corp.microsoft.com\34FB5F65-FFEB-4B61-BF0E-A6A76C450FAA\TraceFormat
    TMP %SystemRoot%\TEMP
    TMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
    TMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp Jack-PC\Jack
    TEMP %SystemRoot%\TEMP
    TEMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
    TEMP %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp Jack-PC\Jack
    QTJAVA C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\ext\QTJava.zip
    PROCESSOR_REVISION 170a
    PROCESSOR_LEVEL 6
    PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER Intel64 Family 6 Model 23 Stepping 10, GenuineIntel
    PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE AMD64
    Platform MCD
    PCBRAND Pavilion
    PATHEXT .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.MSC
    Path %SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\Power2Go;C:\Program Files (x86)\ATI Technologies\ATI.ACE\Core-Static;C:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTSystem\
    OS Windows_NT
    OnlineServices Online Services
    NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS 2
    FP_NO_HOST_CHECK NO
    DFSTRACINGON FALSE
    ComSpec %SystemRoot%\system32\cmd.exe
    CLASSPATH .;C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\lib\ext\QTJava.zip

    Ideas appreciated

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