An Issue Comes Out When Converting the Drive to GPT to Use All of the Space, Any Help?

Best Answered by

Roxanne· Answered on May 19, 2023

As you said, you have a 5 TB drive and can't use all of its space since it was set as MBR. And the most distinct advantage of a GPT disk is it can support more than 2 TB storage capacity, which MBR can not. Therefore, the best way is to fully convert the disk from MBR to GPT to use your 5 TB disk space. 

In addition, the reason why "Convert to GPT greyed out" is that Disk Management can only convert a disk to GPT when it is empty. So you have to delete all of the partitions on the disk before the conversion. So my suggestion is to back up your essential data in advance. Here is the step-by-step tutorial:

• Delete Partition: Right-click any partitions on the target disk and choose "Delete Volume. (Click "Yes" if a window pops up and asks do you confirm to delete all data on the partitions will be deleted.)
• Converting to GPT: When the entire disk show as an unallocated space and the greyed-out problem is gone. Right-click it and select "Convert to GPT Disk." 

If the first solution is a bit complicated, you can resort to EaseUS Partition Master, a one-for-all partition optimization tool. It can easily convert from MBR to GPT without data loss, as well as convert from GPT to MBR.

Check the steps of how to use EaseUS Partition Master:

Important: For data security, you'd better restore the data to another storage device for recovery.

This software has many other features, you can also use it to extend system partition, format a partition, and merge two partitions into one.