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8 August 2017  Amanda J. Brook  Senior Product Manager
 

Summary
Listed the limitations of MBR and advantages of GPT. Hope to do you a favor when creating system disk.



When setting up a new disk on Windows 10, 8.1, 8 or 7, we will be required to choose the MBR or GPT partition structures. However, for most computer, they do not know the difference and the advantages of each partition structure. They just select on at will and click Next. The selection we make at this moment may make a great influence on your needs.
Partition structure decides how information is structure on the partition, where the partition begins and ends. When we migrate system to SSD or clone hard drive, you might be halted because of the different partition structure of source disk and target disk. If you want to migrate system to SSD or clone hard drive, entirely free Renee Becca can free you from such situation by uniting the partition structure.
In fact, we can turn MBR disk to GPT one, but we can make this only when the disk is empty. Once you select GPT or MBR, the partition structures will follow the system for the whole life. If you want to change the partition structure, the only way is to format the disk and reinstall system.

Limitations of MBR Partition Structure

MBR, short for Master Boot Recorder, is still the most compatible and commonly-used partition structure. It is a special boot sector located at the beginning of a drive, which contains a boot loader for the installed system and information about the drive’s logical partitions.
But MBR does have its limitations. It only supports disk under 2TB and up to 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition combination.
Besides, the partition and boot data is stored in one place. Once this place is overwritten or corrupted, you will get in trouble.

Advantages of GPT Partition Structure

Being a newer partition structure, GPT (Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table Format) is gradually replacing MBR. Unlike MBR, GPT allows for a nearly unlimited number of partitions. But Windows allows up to 128 partitions on a GPT-based drive. Honestly, there is no need to create so many partitions to make them work.
Besides, GPT stores partition and boot data in different places and make copies for them. Once the boot information get corrupted, computer can boot from the backed up boot data.