Yes, after cloning the disk, you can use gdisk
to perform in-place conversion of the DOS/MBR label to a GPT one. (There is no specific menu command for that – the label will be automatically converted to GPT as soon as you use w
to write it.)
(For scripts, the same thing can be done non-interactively using sgdisk --mbrtogpt
.)
Alternatively, first create a GPT label on the new disk, create all partitions of the exact sizes needed (using fdisk, sfdisk, gdisk, or whatever tool you prefer), and clone the individual partitions using dd
one by one.
This method has advantages – e.g. when cloning a partition with NTFS filesystem, you can instead use ntfsclone
which skips empty areas making the process faster.
One possible way to clone the partition layout from a MBR disk to a GPT disk is:
sfdisk --dump /dev/OLD | sed "s/^label:.*/label: gpt/; /^label-id:/d" | sfdisk /dev/NEW
(Don't bother cloning the BIOS boot sector manually, as most likely you'll need to install a new GPT-aware boot sector anyway.)
fdisk -l /dev/sdX
, wheresdX
is the 4 TB disk. Which case is it?fdisk
reportsDisklabel type: dos
for DOS partition table in MBR,Disklabel type: gpt
for GPT. I interpret the question according to these.