How to Fix the Issue Windows 11 GPT Not Recognized in 3 Ways?

Overview of the issue “Windows 11 GPT not recognized”

Windows 11 has been published on Oct 5, 2021, and since then, millions of users worldwide have installed Windows 11 or upgraded their PCs to Windows 11. Also, Microsoft has received pretty positive feedback from those people.

Although, most of the time, people get on well with this new operating system, sometimes, there’re still errors and glitches, for example, Windows 11 black screen of death, Windows 11 boot failure, and unable to upgrade to Windows 11. However, this time, we’ll discuss about another error that as of now, many users have complained about – Windows 11 GPT not recognized.

Mostly, this issue occurs to a GPT system disk. When you power on your PC, the computer fails to recognize the GPT boot disk and thus, you cannot boot into Windows successfully.

3 causes of the “GPT not recognized by Windows 11” issue

There’re always reasons behind each problem. So, what causes the failed recognition? Read on and soon you’ll understand why Windows 11 refuses to recognize the boot disk in GPT.

1) You failed to set the GPT disk as the boot disk and in this case, Windows 11 cannot detect it in BIOS and to boot from it.

2) You haven’t enabled UEFI boot mode in BIOS.

3) The motherboard of your PC doesn’t support UEFI boot mode while only Legacy is supported.

How to fix it when the GPT boot disk is not recognized by Windows 11?

Since we’ve already figured out the reason why GPT partition style is not recognized by Windows 11, here, corresponding solutions are given as follows.

Method 1. Set the GPT disk as the boot disk in BIOS

If the GPT disk is not set as the boot disk correctly, then, there’s no way for you to boot into Windows. Thus, let’s follow the step-by-step guide to make it right.

1. Restart your computer and hit F2/F8/Del continuously during the startup to enter BIOS.

2. Under the Boot tab, you can change the boot order for hard disks.

3. Set the GPT disk as the first boot device by using arrows keys.

Method 2. Enable UEFI

You might forget to enable UEFI boot mode in BIOS to match the boot disk in GPT and under this circumstance, the GPT system disk won’t be recognized by the PC since it’s in Legacy boot mode. So, the best way to resolve it is to switch the boot mode from Legacy to UEFI.

1. Reboot your computer and continuously hit F2/F8/Del key during the startup to enter BIOS.

2. Under the Boot tab, you can find the boot mode option.

3. If it currently shows Legacy, then, switch it to UEFI.

4. Hit F10 to save the change and exit BIOS.

Method 3. Convert GPT to MBR

As mentioned above, your PC’s motherboard may not support UEFI boot mode and in this case, if the boot disk is currently in the GPT partition style, it’s unable to boot the PC since the boot mode is in Legacy that requires MBR. So, as you can see, you might as well convert GPT to MBR to be compatible with Legacy.

But how? When it comes to GPT-MBR conversion, I highly recommend a powerful third-party software utility – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional – that’s able to convert GPT to MBR or MBR to GPT without data loss in only a few clicks. Maybe, you’ll ask why not use the 2 free Windows built-in utilities Disk Management and DiskPart since they’re also capable of GPT-MBR conversion. The answer is that to make the disk conversion with either Disk Management or DiskPart, all partitions on the hard disk have to be deleted first and thus, users will suffer from severe data loss. With the AOMEI product, all data will be preserved.

More than GPT-MBR conversion, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional supports useful features including primary disk to logical disk conversion, SSD secure erase, and partition splitting.

Does Windows 11 recognize the GPT boot disk? The answer is yes. But to boot successfully, the boot mode should be UEFI. If not, you might as well convert GPT to MBR with the best disk manager. Now, download the demo to have a try!

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Right-click on the GPT disk and select “Convert to MBR”.

Step 2. Click on “OK” when asked to confirm the operation.

Step 3. Hit “Apply” to commit the pending operation.

Wait a few seconds before the process gets completed.

Conclusion

How to fix the issue Windows 11 GPT not recognized efficiently? In this post, the explanation of the causes of this problem is given and meanwhile, 3 corresponding solutions are provided. I ran into the same issue the other days. When I got desperate, it was AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional that helped me out. Like what mentioned in the post, I converted GPT to MBR and perfectly resolved the problem. Meanwhile, I found to make this software work on Servers, we could try the Server edition.