Hard drives are getting larger. The amount of information people are saving is growing rapidly. If you have a very large music, picture, or video collection you might want to consider using GPT instead of MBR as your partitioning system.

MBR partitions have been around for a long time. The GPT disk partitioning system is new and only works in XP x64, Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Server 2008. GPT’s advantages over MBR are:

• GPT can support up to 128 partitions. MBR can only support 4.
• A GPT partition can theoretically be as large as 18,000,000 terabytes in size!
• GPT uses primary and backup partition tables.

This guide shows you how to convert a brand new (empty) MBR style disk to a GPT disk.

Converting from MBR to GPT Disks

1. Right-click Computer in the Start Menu and then select Manage.
2. Select Disk Management in the left column.
3. Right-click the MBR drive you want to convert to GPT and then click Convert to GPT Disk.

Note: If the drive isn’t empty or it contains partitions you can’t convert it to GPT.