I have a 250GB SSD running Linux Mint with a 1GB FAT32 EFI system partition and a single primary EXT4 partition that serves as the root directory. The secondary operating system is Windows, and they are set up as a dual-boot configuration from separate disks. I've noticed that my disk is currently using MBR, and I've read that GPT is the preferred format these days. My question is, can I easily convert my MBR disk to GPT using gdisk, and will it impact my existing setup since I don't want to create a new EFI partition? I'm looking for some reassurance before I go ahead with the conversion, especially since the whole MBR vs. GPT topic is a bit confusing.
1 Answer
Honestly, if everything is working fine for you, I’d suggest just leaving it as is. Maybe consider switching to GPT if you decide to do a reinstall in the future. Just remember, tools like gparted can wipe the drive to set up a new GPT partition table, which means you lose your data. Historically, there have been methods to convert MBR to GPT while keeping files, but a lot of people have faced issues with those, so why risk it? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
That makes sense! My install is still pretty fresh, so I’m not too attached to the data just yet. If I understand correctly, the main drawbacks of MBR for my setup would be related to storage limits? I'm just making sure I have everything set up right with Grub in UEFI mode.