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I recently bought a refurbished Dell Precision 7510 running Windows 10 and decided to clone the included HHD to an NVMe SSD. In the process, I noticed my laptop's partition system was set to MBR and my laptop has been in UEFI mode all the time I have been using it. I have read in many articles a GPT partition system should always be used with EFI boot and am unsure if my refurbisher did this for a reason.

Should I convert the partition system and, if so, how should I do so in a safe way?

JW0914
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james
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2 Answers2

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If Windows works, then everything is already configured properly. If your disk is indeed partitioned using MBR, then the UEFI is configured to emulate a BIOS and Windows boots as if it was a BIOS. We know that because Windows supports MBR only when booting in BIOS mode and GPT only when booting in UEFI mode. It's not broken, don't fix it.

If you want to convert to GPT for some reason, the mbr2gpt tool can do that if your system satisfies a few requirements. But if you don't have any actual problem that you're trying to solve, I'd advise to keep it as it is.

gronostaj
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UEFI firmware can install Windows 10 to MBR, but the UEFI BIOS must be set to Legacy Mode. Without Legacy Mode, only GPT is allowed for Windows 64-bit.

MBR is just as good as GPT. The only advantage of GPT is that it allows using hard disks of more than 2 TB.

Note that Windows can use a GPT disk in Legacy Mode, as long as this is not the system drive. An additional disk can be in GPT format.

Converting between MBR and GPT via Windows will destroy the disk's contents. Third-party utilities exist that can do the conversion without data-loss, but it's still advised to make a disk-image backup in case it fails.

harrymc
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