You can do this with the diskpart command from a Command Prompt window. Here you can do the conversion by using either the command prompt or the disk management tool. It may take more time than using a conversion feature, but this is the officially supported way and you have a certainty that you will not run into any partition problems or loss of data. So it is safer to just backup the drive, wipe the data, convert the partition scheme, and move any essential data back to the disk. However, Microsoft does not support them officially, and hence you would anyway want to backup your data before running such programs in case you face technical issues which result in loss of data. Some third-party partition management programs guarantee that they can convert MBR to GPT and GPT to MBR without any data loss. There is also an alternative way to convert between disks. The conversion methods explained below demonstrate how to wipe the disk of all its contents and partition tables, and then convert it to the other partition scheme and set it up from scratch again. So backup all the data on the disk prior to wiping its contents. To convert a disk from MBR to GPT, or from GPT to MBR, you will have to erase the data of the disk first. If it is an MBR disk, it will be blank under the Gpt column. If a disk is GPT, it will have an asterisk (* character) under the “Gpt” column. Type the following two commands, pressing Enter after each one:

You can also find the command prompt shortcut in the Start menu, right-click it, and select “Run as Administrator”. First, you need to run a command prompt window as Administrator by right-clicking the Start button or pressing Windows Key+X and selecting “Command Prompt (Admin)”. You can check the partition table using the standard DiskPart command in a command prompt window.

By using the Windows’ graphical Disk Management tool.

There are two ways to check which partition table your disk is using – How to Identify Which Partition Table Your Disk Is Using

For more information about MBR and GPT, you can check out our post – MBR vs GPT. MBR is required for booting older Windows systems in BIOS mode. GPT is more advanced and is required for booting Windows systems in UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) mode.

Modern or newer versions of Windows and other operating systems can use either the older Master Boot Record (MBR) or newer GUID Partition Table (GPT) for their partition schemes. The most widely used methods are MBR (Master Boot Record) and GPT (GUID Partition Table). There are different ways to store the partition table on a drive.

Disk management mbr or gpt