GPT disk, should I use it?

[arthurleung]

GPT is supported in x64 windows, and it appears that it have redundunt partition table, so I'm going to try using it. Any disadvantage in using a GPT dynamic disk? i.e. Hard to recover if I ever need it?

[8bit]

Did a quick google search for "GPT Disk" and got the following:

http://www.mcmcse.com/microsoft/guid...menttool.shtml

Seems to suggest they're only available on Itanium processor based machines using their EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) so I wouldn't have thought it was supported on Athlon64 yet as I didn't think AMD had EFI support at present.

From the little I've read so far I'd imagine you'd be fine so long as you're only ever going to use that operating system on the machine. If you wanted to dual boot a Linux or similar you'd hit problems, I completely trashed my Windows and Linux one time by converting my hard disk just to a Dynamic Disk.

From what I gather, if you wanted to have more than 3 primary and one extended (containing one or more logical) partitions it would be a good idea, or if you had an 18 Exabyte disk you wanted in one big partition!

I can't see that it would improve disk performance at all, probably decrease it in fact as that's another layer of complexity in the configuration since NTFS will have to run on top of GPT before it can access the hardware. I wouldn't if I were you, basically because in terms of recovery I wouldn't know what I was dealing with if the proverbial hit the fan.

You're in Aberdeen eh?
/waves

hope this helps in some way

EDIT:
Found this on Microsoft.com
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...b_cnc_ywwc.asp

EDIT 2:
Based on a quick look at the stuff on microsoft.com above, you can't use tools designed for MBR partitioned disks to recover GPT partitioned disks. Also it says that Itanium based machines have EFI instead of a BIOS. Based on this, I suspect that if you were able to successfully convert your disk to GPT, when you reboot it the BIOS would not be able to read the disk and the machine would need formatted and reinstalled. I would guess it would throw an error on an A64 machine when trying to convert but either way personally I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, I suspect it's something someone left in when converting XP64 to athlon64 from Itanium. Guess it comes down to - How brave are you feeling?

EDIT 3:
And the disk you want to convert must also be empty (i.e. contain no existing partitions at all) when you convert it.