MBR and GPT Partition Tables

welcome to the ite free training video on MBR and GPT partition tables a partition table forms the low-level structure that must be present before a hard disk can be formatted and data copied on it a lot of operating systems will make the choice on which partition table to use and you may not have been aware that there are 2 different partition tables available by the end of this video you will understand how these different partition tables work and which features are available on each before a hard disk can be used it needs to have a partition scheme configured on it the partition scheme allows the hard disk to be divided up into partitions let's take a typical hard disk like the one shown the hard disk contains space that can be used for data before this space can be used it needs to be divided up into partitions once a partition is created it can be formatted by the operating system and data stored on it there are two different partition tables that are available these are MBR and GPT MBR is the older of the two and thus has the most compatibility with operating systems and hardware GPT is the newer standard and has more features but requires certain hardware in order to work to start with I will look at MBR the MBR or Master Boot Record was first introduced on pcs back in 1983 since then it has become the de-facto standard on pcs for hard disks and thus offers great compatibility MBR allows the hard disk to be divided up into four partitions one of these partitions can be changed into what is called an extended partition an extended partition in the old ms-dos days could contain an additional 23 partitions taking the total number of partitions to 26 to match the number of available drive letters this was a limitation of DOS however alternate operating systems were able to create more than 23 partitions if for some reason required that many as a partition table the MBR system offers some good features and has great support but has one major limitation in modern computing this is that it is limited to 2 terabytes of usable space if you were to install a hard disk larger than 2 terabytes you could use the hard disk with MBR however any space after 2 terabytes would be lost you can see that although MBR can offer the basic features a user requires its days are numbered due to the limitation of how much hard-disk space it can access the replacement for MBR is GPT or good partition table GPT supports 128 partitions without the need to change an existing partition into an extended partition like MBR requires GPT supports hard disk sizes in zettabytes the actual amount varies depending on what size the hard disk manufacturer makes the sectors on the hard disk but either way a zettabyte is a lot of data currently with terabyte hard disks on the market first petra bite and exabyte hard disks need to be made before we get close to a zettabyte hard disk if you want to boot your operating system from a hard disk using a GPT partition table you first need to meet some requirements first you need a BIOS that supports unified extensible firmware interface or UEFI UEFI was designed as a replacement for the previous system called BIOS UEFI manufacturers generally offer backward compatibility with BIOS however UEFI does require 64-bit hardware to boot off and a 64-bit operating system for boot support you need Windows XP Professional or Windows Server 2003 or above and they need to be the 64-bit version if you are using Linux most modern 32-bit and 64-bit Linux systems will support booting from GPT hard disks or the GPT hard drive being used as a data drive you will need to check the details of your particular distribution to see if it is supported what this essentially means is that if you want to boot off a hard disk that is larger than 2 terabytes you will need to use GPT hardware and have operating system support however even if your system does not support these requirements many operating systems will support GPT as a data drive Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 will support GPT as a data drive even on a 32-bit system without hardware support in the real world if you have a drive less than 2 terabytes MBR should meet all your needs there is no need to change the GPT if however you do find that you need to convert between the two it is possible in Windows however this will require all the partitions to be created which will erase all the data on the drive if you were using Linux it is possible to convert the partition table without losing data however you should always back up your data beforehand just in case lastly there is third-party software available that will perform the conversion if you are willing to pay for it in the next video I will look at how Disk Management is handled with MBR and GPT disks and windows and although not required for the Microsoft exam I will look at using Linux to convert an MBR boot partition to GPT well I hope you found this video useful and hope to see you in the next video bye for now

Channel: itfreetraining

Views: 372,298

Keywords: MBR, GPT, ITFreeTraining

Id: vMB8uyosdOA

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2013