How to Check If a Disk Drive is GPT or MBR in Windows 10/11

In most cases, you don’t need to know which partition scheme your hard disk uses. However, if you have just assembled a new PC, you might be asked to select between MPR and GPT partitions. Also, some software needs to specify the partition scheme before the installation process.

If you are wondering about the difference between the two, GPT is a modern partition scheme required to boot the Windows operating system in UEFI mode. On the other hand, MBR is needed to boot older Windows versions in BIOS mode. If you want to install the latest Windows 10, you might need to use the GPT partition scheme.

Also Read: 10 Best Tools To Check & Repair Hard Disk Errors

How to Check If a Disk Drive is GPT or MBR in Windows

You need to know the disk partition scheme before preparing a bootable USB drive to ensure an error-free installation of Windows 10. So, it’s always best to know if a Disk drive uses GPT or MBR on a Windows pc.

1. Through Disk Management

Well, you can use Windows 10’s built-in Disk Management utility to determine whether a disk is GPT or MBR. Follow the simple steps given below.

1. First, right-click the Start button and select Disk Management.

Disk Management

2. This will open the Disk Management tool.

3. Right-click on the disk whose partition scheme you want to know and select Properties.

select 'Properties.'

4. On the next Window, select the Volumes tab.

select the 'Volumes' tab

5. Now check the Partition style. The partition style section will tell you about the partition style used on the disk.

partition style section

2. Using Command Prompt

The Command Prompt method might not be the easiest, but it’s still pretty effective. Follow the simple steps below to check if a disk uses the GPT or MBR partition style.

2. First, click on Windows Search and search for CMD. Right-click on CMD and select Run as administrator.

Select 'Run as administrator.'

2. On the Command Prompt Window, enter the disk part and hit the Enter button.

enter 'diskpart'

3. Next, enter list disk on the Command prompt and hit the enter button.

enter 'list disk'

4. If a disk is GPT, it will have an asterisk(*) character under the GPT column. If the asterisk character is missing from the GPT column, it’s an MBR disk.

GPT GPT

3. Using Powershell

Like the Command prompt, you can utilize Windows Powershell to determine whether the disk drive uses GPT or MBR partition style.

1. First of all, search for Powershell on Windows search. Now right-click on the Powershell and select Run as Administrator.

select 'Run as Administrator.'

2. On the Powershell Window, type in Get-Disk and hit the Enter button.

type in 'Get-Disk'

3. Now, look at the Partition Style column. This column lists whether a disk drive uses a GPT or MBR scheme.

look at the 'Partition Style' column

How to Convert MBR to GPT on Windows?

If you get errors like ‘Windows can’t be installed to this disk’ while clean installing Windows 10/11, you will have to convert the MBR disk to GPT.

We shared a detailed guide on converting MBR to GPT on Windows. You can follow that guide to convert MBR to GPT.

This article is about checking whether a drive uses the GPT or MBR partition style on Windows. I hope this article helped you! Please share it with your friends, too. If you have any doubts, let us know in the comment box below.