Clone a Dynamic GPT system disk to a Basic GPT disk and make it bootable

本文适用于:
EaseUS Partition Master (all paid versions from V10.0 to V12.5)

Basic knowledge

GPT is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk, using globally unique identifiers (GUID). Although it forms a part of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) standard (Unified EFI Forum proposed replacement for the PC BIOS), it is also used on some BIOS systems because of the limitations of master boot record (MBR) partition tables, which use 32 bits for storing logical block addresses (LBA) and size information.

As of 2010, most current operating systems support GPT. Some, including OS X and Microsoft Windows on x86, only support booting from GPT partitions on systems with EFI firmware, but FreeBSD and most Linux distributions can boot from GPT partitions on systems with either legacy BIOS firmware interface or EFI.

In most case, users converted the basic GPT disk to dynamic GPT disk by mistake, and then it cannot be converted back to basic GPT. The system volume on dynamic GPT disk have many limits.

Description

Due to the complexity of the disk structure, Dynamic GPT disk with System and Boot partitions only supports limited operations of EaseUS Partition Master including Surface test and View properties.

As for the Boot partition- usually the C: partition which resides on a Dynamic GPT disk, the operations are also limited.

So, how to enlarge the C: partition on Dynamic GPT disk when needed?

EaseUS gives a workaround below:

1. Prepare a new Basic GPT disk as the destination disk;

2. Create a 200MB FAT32 partition on the destination disk from the start of the destination disk followed by a whole NTFS partition stretching across all the remaining disk space.

3.Install the EaseUS Todo Backup Trial to clone the Boot partition- the EFI partition from the source disk to the destination disk.

When you finish the clone, the destination disk should look like below in the Disk management:

4. Assign a temporary drive letter to the System partition of the original disk.

The commands you need to enter in the Command Prompt are listed below:

5.Open regedit.exe, find the BCD00000000 folder from the HKEY_LOCA_MACHINE node and Unload hive by clicking the selection from File menu to unload hive the current BCD record:

6.进入xcopy命令复制系统的一部分ition-- the EFI partition with the temporarily assigned drive letter K from the original disk to the newly created FAT32 partition on the destination disk.

7.Run bcdedit /store E:EFIMicrosoftBootcd command to check whether the device index under Windows Boot Manager points to the new System partition- the partition E: and the device and osdevice indexes point to the new Boot partition- partition G:.

8.As the system doesn't have the BCD index we expect, the BCD index of Windows Boot Manager and Windows Boot Loader needs to be edited using the following commands:
bcdedit /store E:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bcd /set {bootmgr} device partition=E:
bcdedit /store E:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bcd /set {default} device partition=G:
bcdedit /store E:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bcd /set {default} osdevice partition=G:

Run the bcdedit /store E:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bcd command again after executing the above commands to verify the BCD index.

9.Use the bootice.exe tool to create a new UEFI boot entry for the destination disk.

The instructions are displayed in the screenshot below:

Browse to the “bootmgfw.efi” file and click “Open”.


Click “OK” when there pop-ups a dialog box prompting “Successfully added a UEFI boot Entry”.

Check the “Boot this entry next time” check box and click the “Save current boot entry” button to exit the bootice.exe tool.

10.Using diskpart command to set the id of E: partition as an EFI partition ID:
c12a7328-f81f-11d2-ba4b-00a0c93ec93b

11.Restart your computer. The computer would boot up from the new Disk.

The Disk management of the system after reboot would look as follows:

12.As your System could boot up from the newly cloned destination disk, you can delete all the partitions on the original source disk and convert it to Basic disk. You can clone the newly cloned disk back to the original disk and boot up from there. Then you could adjust the size of the partitions on the original disk.