Question Failing to convert drive from MBR to GPT

souley16

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Mar 30, 2015
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I was trying to update my PC to Windows 11 but it required me to convert the drive that contains my OS to GPT. I am trying to convert the drive to GPT so that I can upgrade to Windows 11 without deleting my main Os partition. What am I missing here? The following are infos about the drive and things I've tried:

Drive is about 2TB

In Wndows 10:
Disk Management shows 3 partitions
System Reserved | 100 MB NTFS | Healthy (system, active, primary)
C: | 1906 GB NTFS | Healthy(Boot, page file, crash dump, logical drive)
1.02 GB NTFS | Healthy (Logical Drive)


When I ran the following,
MBR2GPT /CONVERT /ALLOWFULL0S /DISK:1
output:
Disk layout validation failed for disk 1

I checked the "setuperr" file in my main Os Windows Folder and saw "ValidateLayout: Unrecognized partition found, index 1".

Diskpart shows 4 partitions
DISKPART> SEL DISK 1
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> LIST PART
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Primary 100 MB 1024 KB
Partition 0 Extended 1907 GB 101 MB
Partition 2 Logical 1906 GB 102 MB
Partition 3 Logical 1047 MB 1906 GB


DISKPART> SEL PART 0
Partition 0 is now the selected partition.
DISKPART> DET PART
Partition 0
Type : 0F
Hidden: No
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 106930688


SEL PART 0
DELETE PART
> Got error
Virtual Disk Service error:
The extended partition is not empty.


DELETE PART OVERRIDE shows the same error as "DELETE"

I also tried all previous commands while booted with a windows 10 boot disc
 
Can't do it while actively running windows from that disk. Start windows11installation from USB, enter command prompt and do disk part from there.
Suggest you do full disk backup first or at least copy personal files before trying.
 
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You can't delete an extended partition without first deleting the logical drives within that partition. But why would you want to do this (in Diskpart) if the goal is to preserve your data?

You could probably do this conversion with DMDE (a disc editor), but it wouldn't be straightforward.
 
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