what is difference between gpt partition and mbr partition and where structure differs?

Question

Where GPT table using and MBR partition table using. Windows 8 installing and booting in UEFI mode so it is supporting GPT partition style so we can create 128 primary partitions using windows8? can anybody help me clearly to come out from this confusion?

Answer 1

MBR is the standard partitioning scheme that's been used on hard disks since the PC first came out. It supports 4 primary partitions per hard drive, and a maximum partition size of 2TB.

GPT disks are new, and are readable only by Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Vista (all versions), and Windows XP x64 Edition. The GPT disk itself can support a volume up to 2⁶⁴ blocks in length. (For 512-byte blocks, this is 9.44 ZB - zettabytes. 1 ZB is 1 billion terabytes). It can also support theoretically unlimited partitions.

Windows restricts these limits further to 256 TB for a single partition (NTFS limit), and 128 partitions.

Only Itanium systems running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista systems with an EFI BIOS can boot from a GPT disk. The other operating systems mentioned earlier can use GPT disks as data disks but not boot disks.

Answer 2

Master boot record (MBR) disks use the standard BIOS partition table. GUID partition table (GPT) disks use unified extensible firmware interface (UEFI). One advantage of GPT disks is that you can have more than four partitions on each disk. GPT is also required for disks larger than 2 terabytes.

You can change a disk from MBR to GPT partition style as long as the disk does not contain any partitions or volumes.

You cannot use the GPT partition style on removable media, or on cluster disks that are connected to shared SCSI or Fibre Channel buses that are used by the Cluster service.