How To Solve MBR Disk 2TB Partition Limit in Windows 8/8.1/7/Vista?

What is the MBR 2TB partition limit?

When you buy a new disk, more than 2TB after you plug it into your Windows computer,  you can only see 2TB of disk space and cannot use the rest of the drive. Why can’t you have a partition larger than 2TB?

As storage has gotten bigger and cheaper, more and more people come to this question when they upgrade their hard disks. Now it has become a common problem. Let me take a few minutes to talk about the mysterious 2TB limit. In fact, in a word, it is due to the type of initialization performed on the disk. Your disk is MBR type. The MBR max size supports up to 2TB per single partition. So you can only see and use 2TB on your computer.

How break the MBR size limit without deleting data?

Now that you have known 2TB is the max volume in an MBR disk. One more thing you also might need to know is that there are two types of disk, another is called GPT(GUID Partition Table), a new partition/disk style, which supports disk capacity bigger than 2TB. So the solution is to comvert MBR to GPT? Yes, it is.

First, verify that your computer is equipped with UEFI if your system partition is in the pre-MBR disk. The UEFI will show up in the bios. Second, it is about operating system requirements. You can consult the chart below.

Operating System	Data Access	System Boot
Windows XP 32-bit	Not Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows XP 64-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows Vista 32-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows Vista 64-bit	Support GPT	Support GPT(Need UEFI)
Windows 7 32-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows 7 64-bit	Support GPT	Support GPT(Need UEFI)
Windows 8 32-bit	Support GPT	Not Support GPT
Windows 8 64-bit	Support GPT	Support GPT(Need UEFI)

One more thing is that if you want to upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 8 and your system disk is in the MBR table, you also need to convert this disk to GPT, because the upgrade of Windows 11 requires a GPT system disk and UEFI boot mode.

Everything seemed ready, now you need a tool to change MBR to GPT. A Professional partition manager - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can do this easily and safely. Its "Convert to GPT Disk" is just what you need to fix the problem. This tool can help users to convert disk partition tables without data loss in only three steps to finish the mission.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Right-click the system disk and choose “Convert to GPT” or click the disk and choose "Convert to GPT" from the right column.

Step 2. Click “OK” to confirm your operation.

Step 3. Click on “Apply” to commit the pending operation.

After you have converted MBR to GPT, you can convert a FAT partition to NTFS. The result of Windows with NTFS and GPT is better overall performance.

More about AOMEI Partition Assistant

AOMEI Partition Assistant is an all-in-one partition software. Besides as a partition converter, it has many other practical functions: migrate OS to SSD/HDD, resize partition, move installed programs without reinstalling, allocate free space, and rebuild MBR. And it also has the Server edition to help Windows Server users to manage their devices.