The Only Practical & Free Way to Expand 2TB from MBR to GPT in Windows

BACKGROUND / USE CASE:

I had an old 3TB lying around with an instance on it that I just didn’t want to go through the trouble of migrating. Since I was stuck at 2TB from the days of MBR, I knew I needed to convert to GPT without losing my data. Surprised how hard it was to find a free way to do this. I’d hate for you to have to waste a morning on a two minute task also, so, here go…

PREREQUISITES:

  • UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Motherboard
  • GPT fdisk (gdisk64)
  • Back it up or plan to lose it (this will also streamline our migration AKA plan B)
  • USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

INSTRUCTIONS

“Press Win+R together on your keyboard, type cmd in the Run dialogue and press Enter to open the Command Prompt window.” (Source: 3 Free MBR to GPT Converter for Windows 11/10/8/7 (No Data Loss))

2. In Windows → Start, then type diskpart and hit on Enter to launch the Diskpart tool. Then run the following commands in turn and press Enter after each one.”

list disk

Write down which disk number you are working on to use for next steps…

OPTIONAL: You may wish to remove write protection, as I needed to. For me it was disk 0, for you something different?

select disk 0
attributes disk clear readonly
exit


Source: [Solved] Cannot Format USB Drive Write Protected

The Only Practical Free Way to Expand 2TB from MBR to GPT:

While an admin (right click run as administrator) in terminal/CMD and after navigating to the folder of our downloaded gdisk:

For me it was the following commands (I’m in 64 bit windows). Replace ‘0’ with your own disk number which you got from the previous steps:

.\gdisk64 0: -l
.\gdisk64 0:

Do you think he meant to say tool? I do.


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/374cyq/mbr_gpt/

Our hero: GPT fdisk Tutorial

Works. Like. A. Charm.

I was able to expand my 2TB to 3TB and convert from MBR to GPT without losing data.

(but use at your own risk).