mhbell Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 I have taken Excerpts From several different sources for this article. If you want to know more about GPT and MBR Partitioning, I would recommend a vistit to Rod Smiths Website. rodsmith@rodsbooks.com. What follows is a short primer on MBR and GPT. The main difference between MBR and GPT is that MBR has some limitations for modern usage. Namely, MBR can only handle four primary partitions and 2TB of HDD space. GPT, meanwhile, doesn’t have these limits at all. There’s no limit to partitions or storage outside of what the drive itself can handle. The MBR system originally provided for only four partitions. As a workaround, one of these original (or primary) partitions can be set aside (and is then known as an extended partition) to hold an arbitrary number of logical partitions. This configuration is awkward and can lead to problems, since some OSes can only boot from primary partitions. MBR partitions are susceptible to damage. The primary partition table is stored entirely within the first sector of the disk, so if it's destroyed or damaged, it will be hard to recover the disk's partitions. Logical partitions are stored in a linked list data structure that's scattered over the extended partition, so if a single link is broken, access to the remaining logical partitions will be lost. Here is a screen shot of my partitioning on a second hard drive. All of the partitions are Primary and GPT I can delete partitions in the middle, beginning or end, without hurting the other partitions or any of the other OS’s. Note the EFI partition at the beginning. Mel 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 Interesting stuff. One of these days, if I ever get a machine or mobo that requires this knowledge, I'll be checking it out more thoroughly. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted March 18, 2017 Share Posted March 18, 2017 Rod Smith explains UEFI just about as well as anybody I've read. http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/ 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mhbell Posted March 19, 2017 Author Share Posted March 19, 2017 Rod Smith explains UEFI just about as well as anybody I've read. http://www.rodsbooks...fi-bootloaders/ Yes he does explain it well. I learned a lot from him and I donated $10 to him. he saved me a lot of time especially with SSD Disks and GPT partitioning. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted March 19, 2017 Share Posted March 19, 2017 Good resource. I've always used and referred others to https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-that-actually-work-then/ which is actually linked from the RodsBooks article. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
saturnian Posted March 19, 2017 Share Posted March 19, 2017 Thank you! Good info here. I'll likely refer back to this thread at some point. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted March 20, 2017 Share Posted March 20, 2017 I only use GPT and UEFI as long as the machines support them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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