How to run MBR2GPT in order to convert a System Disk from MBR to GPT. You will see that there are a number of articles suggesting that Diskpart or Disk Management can be used – you should ignore these if you want to keep your installation and programs as they erase the disk before converting.
If you already have a WinPE boot stick, congratulations as you are half way there. If not you need to make the boot stick.
I suggest you log on as Admin to do the following:
Download and install Windows ADK link.
Next download and install the WinPE addon for the ADK, the link for which is in the above.
The next step is to make a WinPE Boot Stick link, this is not big and will comfortably sit in 4Gb.
Change the PC boot order to boot from the stick you just made. You should just get a large coloured terminal screen on booting. Now run Diskpart followed by List Disk, to find the ‘### number’ of the boot stick. link
Then run MBR2GPT link. with a command such as mbr2gpt /convert /disk:0
You will almost certainly get an error message at this point telling you that it cannot convert a disk containing a page file. If you get this reboot into Windows and go to Control Panel->System->Advanced System Settings and set your page file to manual and zero. Reboot and check the pagefile is zapped, then reboot to WinPE and try MBR2GPT again.
If this succeeds you need to alter your bios setting to GPT (do NOT do this before successfully changing the disk structure). Now do the final reboot.
The procedure for a VM is similar, except you have to set the WinPE stick as a hard drive and change the boot order.
As I mentioned in the previous post MBR2GPT is non-trivial. I can see a lot of bricked PCs in the change from Windows 10 to Windows 11 if M$ do not bring out a conversion program or the Easus/Aomei route is not pushed.
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