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Commonly confused · IT Support & Hardware

MBR vs GPT: What's the Difference?

MBR is the legacy partitioning scheme stored in a disk's first sector, limited to 2 TB and four primary partitions. GPT is the modern UEFI-era scheme that supports enormous disks, up to 128 partitions in Windows, and keeps a backup partition table for resilience.

Master Boot Record (MBR)

Full definition
vs

GUID Partition Table (GPT)

Full definition
Master Boot RecordGUID Partition Table
Max disk size2 TBAbout 9.4 ZB
Partitions4 primary (or 3 primary plus 1 extended with logical)128 in Windows by default
RedundancySingle copy of partition tablePrimary and backup header and table, with CRC checks
Firmware pairingBIOSUEFI
Boot data locationFirst 512-byte sectorGPT header plus EFI System Partition
Convert in WindowsDisk Management or diskpart (destructive)mbr2gpt tool converts system disk without data loss
Remember it

MBR is limited to 2 TB and 4 partitions; GPT is practically limitless.

Exam tip

Scenario: a technician cannot use the full capacity of a 4 TB drive, so the disk is MBR and must be GPT. Pair GPT with UEFI and MBR with legacy BIOS.

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