Forum Discussion
MBR2GPT Disk layout validation failed
Thank you for all the help you provided to solve this problem. I have the same message of disk validation failed (see screenshot). And I get this message absolutely regardless from where I try it, within Windows, PE, or recovery. The message WILL REMAIN THE SAME. I even copied the whole HDD to an USB HDD and tried to change that to GPT running the mbr2gpt command, still got the same result. Shrinking the partition and deleting one partition did not help either. not did shrinking the 2nd partition after deleting the 3rd. Are there any further ideas how I can get this to work?
If there are any information missing, please let me know, I will give them to you, as soon as I can and thank you very much for your support!
P.S.
Yes, I deleted the recovery partition years ago and Windows 10 is running just like that in Legacy mode. And also yes, my HW is pretty recent for this PC and supports both UEFI and BIOS, if a detailed information on motherboard/HDDs used is needed, please let me know, though I doubt it is due to the type of mainboard/harddisk that I get this error message.
Stefan_Mocellin I just solved this issue with a key bit of info from @SalmanAhmed
I had a weird 98mb allocation of free space that was highlighted green in the disk management window and thought this might be the problem. I converted it into a new partition to see if this would enable me to validate successfully, which still failed. I then realized it was a "logical" partition and not primary as Salman mentioned above. I barely have any idea what all this means so i googled how to convert a logical to primary using diskpart. https://www.diskpart.com/articles/convert-logical-partition-to-primary-using-diskpart-1881.html
During this process I noticed (and I have no idea why) an "extended" partition in the "list partition" part of diskpart, which didn't show at all in the Disk Management window. Anyway i deleted that and ended up with only three primary partitions that were highlighted in dark blue in Disk Management. So, as a complete novice at this, all i can offer is for you to convert your D and E drives to "primary" partitions as they appear to be a lighter blue "logical" partitions. Good luck! (note that the logical to primary partition conversion requires formatting).
- You can also use macrium reflect software to move over the system reserve partition to the boot drive. I prefer using macrium over aoemi. I find that software difficult to use and in some instances it doesnt execite the task properly.
Hi mramazani
Please follow the below link, I hope this video could be helpful for you.
SalmanAhmed what if I have system reserve on a seprate disk that does not contain the operating system? How can I move the system reserve on the actual disk that I want to apply the conversion and has the OS. Thanks.
Hi Stefan_Mocellin,
Please share the latest screenshots from the disk management console, and cover all the disks and partitions. It will be really helpful in order to identify the issues from your partition table.
- I only reenabled the recovery due to the problem that Windows told me that it cannot find a boot partition, then I only had 3 partitions, all primary. This did not work well either. Even with only 1 partition it did not work. And as seen in the screenshots, there is no systemreserved partition on my drive 0 from which I boot more or less any day. If you need additional information, or want me to post the screenshots again, please let me know. And as written before, it does not make any difference to the outcome of the error messages I receive, wether I run the commands from Windows, or winPE, the results are 100% the same! It is just easier to provide screenshots from the winOS instead of winPE, still same results.
I would be glad if you had any other ideas and thank you very much. - Hello, as I have written before, I did remove all but one partition. I deleted all except one partition. Then I used the free space to create only one large drive, which had all the space in it. Then it told me it cannot find a boot partition.
If you need any further information, I will be glad to provice such. Thank you for your help! - I believe your recovery partition is not a primary partition, from what I can see. You can see the rest are primary and recovery seems to be a logical. mbr2gpt also doesnt support logical partitions either.
I believe mbr doesn't support more than 3 primary partitions.
Here is a suggestion, move the recovery content to primary partition and the remove the that partition and try again. Makesure backup the drives always.
I remember when I did mine, i did not have any recovery partition. Only had system reserved and os partition. Then added the un allocated space at end for validation to pass.
I also did the conversion using windows PE. I posted relevant links before for that method.
Hope this helps. As I can see from the screenshot, you have more than 3 primary partitions in your disk 0. Unfortunately, MPR2GPT tool doesn't support more than 3 primary partitions. Therefore, you must delete the least important partition after backing up the important data.
Please try this way and let me know your feedback. Thanks.
Thank you very much for your reply. regarding your questions, I do have an active/boot partition on disk 0. There is the OS on disk 0, I am booting from disk 0 and the OS which is running is also and only on disk 0. The OS is booting just fine, even though the mbr2gpt.exe is telling me no OS found.
After I did some trickery and reenabled a recovery partition. I get the error that the disk layout failed again 😞 Please find screenshots attached. Thank you very much for your kind help and support in this matter. (please see translations for German words on the screenshots)
From the screen you've shared, the following points seems pretty good for disk 0:
- There must be a maximum of three partitions in the MBR partition table
- You should not have any extended/logical partition, all three partitions must be primary partitions.
Please confirm the following requirement on disk 0:
- You must have active partition on disk 0
- There must be a system partition (OS Partition), and its recommended to boot from the same disk (disk0) while converting MBR to GPT.
Please have a look and let me know your feedback.
- I guess you can try creating a backup image of your os drive. Recovery drive should not interfere with the conversion though. Recovery partition is only for recovery in case your boot drive is corrupted.
- Thank you for that hint, but the article is for Windows 8.1 and in many ways does not work for Windows 10 and I cannot recover anything, without the recovery partition. Thank you anyway for the input. If anyone has instructions how to recover the recovery partition in WINDOWS 10. I would be very interested.
- I had to recreate my recovery partition, to do that i ran refresh
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/how-to-refresh-reset-or-restore-your-pc-51391d9a-eb0a-84a7-69e4-c2c1fbceb8dd Hello and thank you very much for your kind reply. I did delete both partitions (after backing up the data ofc) and then enlarged the C: partition, tried to recreate both partitions, now as primary, but always ran into the following error:
"Cannot find OS partition(s) for disk 0"
I think this is due to the missing Recovery partition, is there an easy way to get that back, I never needed it (till now) and deleted it years ago. Please find the screenshot below and deleting both partitions on DISK:0 will still result in the same error, most likely due to the missing recovery partition. And if possible without Aomai Partition Manager that SW will only work if I pay ~~50€ which I am not willing to pay for a tool that will not work on my PC.
Thank you very much for your help!
Hi dralbot!
I'm glad to hear that the above solution was helpful for you. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and feedback.
-Salman
