Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

When you set up a new disk in Windows 8 or 8.1, you will be asked if you want to use MBR or GPT partitions. GPT is a new standard and is gradually replacing MBR.

GPT brings a lot of new features, but MBR still has the best compatibility. GPT is not a new standard dedicated to Windows-Mac OS XMagi Linux, and other operating systems also use GPT.

You must partition the new disk before using it. MBR (Master Boot Record) and GPT (GUID Partition Table) are two different ways to store partition information on disk. This partition information contains information about where the partition starts so that the operating system knows which sector belongs to which partition and which partition is bootable. When creating partitions on disk, you have to choose between MBR and GPT.

Limitations of MBR

MBR, which means "master boot record", was first proposed in IBM PC DOS 2.0 in 1983.

The "master boot record" is called because it is a special boot sector that exists at the beginning of the drive. This sector contains logical partition information for boot loaders and drives of installed operating systems. The so-called boot loader is a small piece of code used to load larger loaders on other partitions on the drive. If you have installed the Windows,Windows boot loader, the initial information is placed in this area-if the MBR information is overwritten and Windows cannot be started, you will need to use Windows's MBR repair feature to get it back to normal. If you install Linux, the GRUB loader is usually located in MBR.

MBR supports maximum 2TB disks and cannot handle disks larger than 2TB capacity. MBR also supports up to 4 primary partitions-if you want more partitions, you need to create so-called "extended partitions" and create logical partitions in them.

MBR has become the industry standard for disk partitioning and booting.

Advantages of GPT

GPT means GUID partition table. (GUID means globally unique identifier). This is a new standard that is gradually replacing MBR. It and UEFI complement each other-UEFI is used to replace the old BIOS, while GPT replaces the old MBR. It is called a "GUID partition table" because each partition on your drive has a globally unique identifier (globally unique identifier,GUID)-a randomly generated string that ensures that every GPT partition on the planet is assigned a completely unique identifier.

This standard does not have the limitations of MBR. Disk drive capacity can be much larger than the operating system and file system can support. It also supports an almost unlimited number of partitions, limited only to the operating system-Windows supports up to 128GPT partitions, and you don't need to create extended partitions.

On MBR disks, partition and boot information are saved together. If this part of the data is overwritten or destroyed, things will be in trouble. In contrast, GPT keeps multiple copies of this information on the entire disk, so it is more robust and can recover the corrupted information. GPT also keeps cyclic redundancy check codes (CRC) for this information to ensure its integrity and correctness-if the data is corrupted, GPT will detect the corruption and recover it from elsewhere on disk. On the other hand, there is nothing MBR can do about these problems-it is only after the problem occurs that you will find that the computer cannot be started, or the disk partition is missing.

Compatibility

Drives that use GPT will contain a "protective MBR". This MBR would assume that the GPT drive has a partition that occupies the entire disk. If you use the honest MBR disk tool to manage GPT disks, you will only see a partition that occupies the entire disk. This protective MBR ensures that the old disk tools will not treat GPT disks as empty disks without partitions and overwrite pre-existing GPT information with MBR.

On UEFI-based computer systems, all 64-bit versions of Windows 8.1,8,7, and Vista, and their corresponding server versions, can only be booted from GPT partitions. All versions of Windows 8.1,8,7 and Vista can read and use GPT partitions.

Other modern operating systems also support GPT. Linux has built-in GPT support. Apple's MAC computers based on Intel chips no longer use their own APT (Apple Partition Table) and instead use GPT.

We recommend that you use GPT to partition the disk. It is more advanced, more robust, and all computer systems are moving to it. If you need to maintain compatibility with older systems-such as starting Windows on computers that use traditional BIOS-you need to use MBR.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.