Clarifications about my configuration. Windows 7 x64 + Linux

[Michele]

Hi guys, I need your help.

---my laptop: can boot in legacy, hybrid uefi and uefi mode.
---my hdd: partitioned in mbr style
---boot method: legacy boot with grub installed on master boot record
---installed OSs: MXLinux 64 bit and Windows 7 64bit

The problem is that now I need more than 4 partition so I want to change my configuration from mbr/legacy to gpt/uefi and install refind.
I'm tired to reset my hdd every month XD so... These are the steps I need to follow:
1)using a live version of mini tool partition wizard to convert my hdd from mbr to gpt without losing data (I done the opposite in the past and it worked)
2)using partition wizard to create an EFI partition
3)use a live linux iso to install refind on the EFI partition (in pure uefi mode)
4)set the bios to pure uefi mode
5)now it should be possible to boot both Linux and Windows 7
6)OPTIONAL I could use diskpart from windows to create a Microsoft Reserved Partion (If I'm not wrong it isn't strictly necessary)

Will it work in your opinion?
I'm afraid to install a non-working refind... because:
A)I believe that installing it from a live linux distro and I installing the .deb from the package manager can led refind to auto-dectect a "distorted" configuration
B)When I installed Windows 7 I had to install it in mbr/legacy mode because the "bootx64.efi" file was hidden in the iso. Will refind be able to boot it after switching to gpt/uefi?

Thanks in advance

[Roderick W. Smith]

Windows ties its boot mode tightly to the partition table type -- Windows will boot in UEFI mode if and only if the disk uses the GUID Partition Table (GPT); and it will boot in BIOS (or CSM/legacy) mode if and only if the disk uses the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table. (I've heard of some hacks to make Windows more flexible, but I suggest sticking to Microsoft's official limits.) Furthermore, the boot loaders are different for the two modes. Thus, converting from MBR to GPT will require changing the Windows boot mode, which in turn requires installing a fresh boot loader. It's this final part that's the trickiest. Over the years, various people have posted blogs about how to do this, but the ones I've seen have all disappeared. The good news is that Microsoft wrote a tool, MBR2GPT, to do the conversion more-or-less automatically:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/mbr-to-gpt

Thus, if you want to do this, I'd recommend you start with that tool. Once Windows is converted and booting, you can use rEFInd on a USB flash drive to boot your Linux installation and install rEFInd on your hard disk from there.

That said, there's no guarantee that this will work. Microsoft's tool might become confused by the Linux installation or might fail for a million other reasons. The number of possible causes of a failure are so huge that I can't really present a guide to how to overcome these problems. Note that some failures might cause data loss, so I STRONGLY suggest you back up your installations, or at least your user data, before proceeding.

An alternative is to stick with MBR and BIOS/CSM/legacy-mode booting for everything. MBR is limited to four primary partitions, but one of those can be an extended partition, which can hold an arbitrary number of logical partitions. Windows insists on booting from a primary partition, but Linux is not so limited, so you can usually have a pretty complex setup with as many partitions as you like by putting Windows on one to three primary partitions and everything else on logical partitions. (Note that Windows can use logical partitions, but they must be data partitions, not the boot partition.) If you've already got four primary partitions, there are tools that can convert from primary to extended/logical. Some commercial Windows tools can do this, but I'm not very familiar with them. My own FixParts (which is installed as part of the gdisk or gptfdisk package in most Linux distributions) can do the job, too. See here for more on FixParts:

https://www.rodsbooks.com/fixparts/

Note that FixParts does more than primary-to-logical conversions, and the above Web site covers its repair features, in addition to its primary-to-logical conversion features.

[Michele]

Hi Roderick, many thanks for the exhaustive reply, you are very kind.
I've never heard about this mbr2gpt tool! I'm going to use it instead of Mini Tool.
I understand that I could get problems so I think I'll delete any linux partition before doing this... Reinstalling just Linux is always better than reinstalling both Windows and Linux.
To avoid other complication I think that before using the mbr2gpt tool I'll also have to replace GRUB on my pc it with the default Windows 7 bootloader . Which tool do you recommend me to perform this operation? I think that the "rebuild mbr" function of MiniTool is ok, but If you can name some better solution it would be great

[Roderick W. Smith]

Chances are MiniTool's "rebuild MBR" function would work; however, I'm getting a bit rusty at MBR boot loader operations in Windows. There are various tools and procedures that will do the trick, though. Here's a page that covers the options:

https://neosmart.net/wiki/fix-mbr/