Restoring an MBR System Image to UEFI/GPT

The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is an interface between a computer's firmware and operating system. It is designed as a replacement for Basic Input/Output System (BIOS). UEFI supports hard disks with either master boot record (MBR) or the newer GUID Partition Table (GPT) system. GPT is a newer standard that supports disks larger than 2TiB and allows for more than four primary partitions per disk.

As UEFI and GPT are increasingly widespread, older images of MBR disks often need restoring to replacement UEFI / GPT systems.

Rescue media created on Windows 7 and later is dual boot, meaning it boots in both MBR and UEFI mode. Boot your rescue media in UEFI mode. Consult your Motherboard user manual for information on how to do this.

Caution: We assume there are no other hardware differences between the system being imaged and the system being restored to. For dissimilar hardware, use ReDeploy. 


1. Boot into Windows PE.

2. Open a Windows command window. To open a command window click the icon on the taskbar.

3. Type:

Diskpart

4. Type: 

list disk

5. Select the disk number that you want to restore to. For example:

select disk 0

6. Clean the selected disk:

clean

7. By default, "clean" creates an empty MBR disk. Next, convert it to GPT:

convert GPT

8. Create the EFI partition:

create partition efi size=200

9. Format the EFI partition:

format fs=fat32

10. Create the MSR partition:

create partition msr size=128

11. Exit Diskpart:

exit

12. In Macrium Reflect, click the 'Create Backups' tab.

13. Click 'Refresh' to read the newly initialized disk:

 image2021-5-4_13-36-55.png

14. Click the 'Existing Backups' tab.

15. Select the image file and select the 'Restore' icon, drag and drop the imaged partitions but DO NOT restore the MSR partition from the image file. In this example, only the C partition is restored to the target disk.

image2021-5-4_13-34-6.png

16. When the restore is complete, configure the UEFI boot files in the EFI system partition by following the steps in the section Fix Boot problems for GPT/UEFI Boot Systems in this KB article.