On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 3:59 PM, Reimer, Mark <mark.rei...@prairie.edu> wrote: > I did some Googling with conflicting answers on whether I can make it bigger > and how. I think the bottom line is: I can make it bigger, but I have to > reformat it as a GPT Partition (of course, saving all the data before the > format, and restoring afterward).
Hmmm... MBR has a hard limit of 2 terabytes. Technically speaking, there's nothing that says the OS *has* to believe the partition table on the disk, but I don't think there's a way to tell Windows otherwise. It may be possible to convert in-place from MBR to GPT. MBR lives in sector 0 (zero). The GPT lives in sectors 1 through N, with a backup in sectors (X-N) through X (where X=end-of-disk). Windows normally leaves some sectors unallocated at the start of a disk; those may be enough to contain a GPT. And the end of the newly-extended disk will of course not be allocated. If nothing else, if you first extended the logical disk, then used a GPT-aware partitioning tool to create GPT entries which exactly match the start and length of your existing partitions, as long as the size of the GPT didn't run into the start of your first partition, I think you'd be okay. There may even be tools out there to do all that automatically. https://www.google.com/search?q=convert+MBR+to+GPT Here's one write up I found: http://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/mbr2gpt.html I would still make a full backup of everything first. It's very easy to wipe out everything in seconds when you start playing with partition tables. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
