What Is An MBR Partition Table

Hi, I'm setting up my new disk through Windows 10 Disk Management, and it's now asking me to initialize it with two options: MBR and GPT. Does anyone know what an MBR is? Thanks in advance!

An MBR (Master Boot Record) partition table is one of the partitioning styles used to organize data on storage devices like HDD, SSD, and USB drives. And the other one is the GPT (GUID Partition Table) partition table.

The key features of an MBR partition table are:

• It is stored in the first sector (sector 0) of a partitioned storage device.
• It contains executable code to function as a boot loader for OS.
• It holds information on how the disk's sectors are divided into partitions.
• It supports only 4 primary partitions, or 3 primary and 1 extended partition that can contain logical drives.
• It has a 32-bit addressing scheme that limits the maximum partition size to 2 TB.

An MBR disk only supports the legacy BIOS boot mode, so you should verify whether your system is using BIOS or UEFI before initialization.

If you have mistakenly initialized the disk, third-party tools like EaseUS Partition Master can help you safely convert from MBR to GPT or vice versa.

Related article: MBR VS GPT | What's the Difference and Which Is Better