I'm lost as to how to get a drive that's portioned as GPT to boot from the hard drive as Legacy drive and then boot from a USB. What's going on Here? I used some "code" to see what the drive was portioned as and it said "GPT. Is there a "convert" to change a GPT to a MBR for Linux?
MBR and GPT partitioning schemes (No Boot Device Found)
- Thread starter bjr23
- Start date
I don't know of anyway to "convert" an existing one.
But there are a few different ways to re-create partition table as MBR or GPT.
gparted and fdisk will both do it. The gotcha is... it erases whatever is on disk.
You will need to add partitions and format them.
But there are a few different ways to re-create partition table as MBR or GPT.
gparted and fdisk will both do it. The gotcha is... it erases whatever is on disk.
You will need to add partitions and format them.
There is no way to convert a drive from GPT to MBR without wiping the data on the drive. You must find a way to backup the files to another drive (formatted MBR), or be able to recreate the files on the erased drive after you change the partition table type.
(The funny thing is that you can convert in the other direction, from MBR to GPT, without losing data. Unfortunately, that is not what you need.)
(The funny thing is that you can convert in the other direction, from MBR to GPT, without losing data. Unfortunately, that is not what you need.)
If you could explain in more detail the issue, then more help may be available.
Why can't you boot from the GPT partition?
The gdisk program can convert GPT to MBR, but will only be able to create 4 partitions because that's the limitation of the standard partitioning format. If you run gdisk on your disk, it should show "MBR: protective" in its output which means basically that it has a reserved mbr sector, but it doesn't use it, rather just keeps it for legacy reasons. When running gdisk, you'd choose the "recovery and transformation" option and go from there. You need to know what you are doing.
If the issue is a matter of just booting from a usb, then you don't usually need a legacy system to do that. If you insert the usb before booting, and choose the "boot menu" on your system at boot time, it will usually just offer you the choice of booting the usb, and might even offer to boot it in standard or EFI formats.
YMMV.
