Question How can i clone windows from MBR HDD to GPT SSD?

[DolaaZ]

How can i clone windows from MBR HDD to GPT SSD?

 

[Darkbreeze]

So, there are always ways to do most things, but this is not something you would likely want to do anyhow. What is the purpose of doing this?

Generally speaking, if you are going from a system where you had a legacy installation and now are looking to have a UEFI installation, and you have now met the hardware requirements due to your change of platform, then you would not EVEN want to screw that up by using a clone from one platform to another. Much less from a legacy installation to a a partition format that favors UEFI configurations. Just do a clean install. Back up anything important on your current installation, files, folders, music, movies, bookmarks, settings, pictures, etc., to some other source like an external drive, flash drive or cloud storage, then do a clean install.

Going from MBR hard drive to GPT SSD, means there has been a significant change of hardware, and that also means you do not want to try using the same registry configuration, in most cases anyhow. If it's on the same platform, with no change of platform, it might work, but any significant change of hardware configuration on Windows, especially when going from legacy to UEFI configurations, is absolutely best done via clean install otherwise the chances remain very high that you will encounter some kind of problems, or lots of them, as a result.

How to do a CLEAN installation of Windows 10, the RIGHT way​

 

[BFG-9000]

If you are NOT moving this install to a new system and ONLY wanting to change your BIOS setting from Legacy BIOS to UEFI, then you could try using mbr2gpt.exe to convert. If it doesn't work and you have to do a clean install anyway then you've only lost a bit of time.

Seeing as you have a handy 2nd drive available, clone the HDD to it before converting the HDD in case something goes wrong. Once everything is clearly working fine, you can then again clone to overwrite the SSD, and finally swap the drives.

That's if the SSD is SATA. If the SSD is NVMe then before anything else that must first be installed and seen by the HDD Windows install so drivers get installed before the clone or it won't boot, and by that point you have added so many levels of complication that it's probably best to just do a clean install as above to begin with.

 

[SkyNetRising]

How can i clone windows from MBR HDD to GPT SSD?

You have 2 options plus 1 advanced option.
1. Convert HDD to GPT, then clone. Use mbr2gpt for conversion.
2. Clone to SSD in MBR, then convert to GPT.
3. Advanced option. Clone from MBR to GPT directly in partition to partition clone mode. Then recreate bootloader manually. This requires some knowledge about properly creating UEFI bootloader.

I'm assuming here, you have a single storage drive in system. Not like five drives with windows on one drive and bootloader on another drive.