diskpart shows one partition as two different ones

I want to convert my hard disk from MBR to GPT via mbr2gpt, but for it to work, I can have a maximum of three primary partitions and diskpart is labeling the same partition as two separate partitions [extended and logical]; how can I fix this?

• While I only have four partitions, diskpart shows five:
• Disk Management shows only four partitions:

Solution 1:

You have an extended partition, which is a mechanism for avoiding the maximum partition number of MBR, which is 4.

The documentation of mbr2gpt includes this:

Disk Prerequisites

Before any change to the disk is made, MBR2GPT validates the layout and geometry of the selected disk to ensure that:

• The disk is currently using MBR
• There is enough space not occupied by partitions to store the primary and secondary GPTs:
  • 16KB + 2 sectors at the front of the disk
  • 16KB + 1 sector at the end of the disk
• There are at most 3 primary partitions in the MBR partition table
• One of the partitions is set as active and is the system partition
• The disk does not have any extended/logical partition
• The BCD store on the system partition contains a default OS entry pointing to an OS partition
• The volume IDs can be retrieved for each volume which has a drive letter assigned
• All partitions on the disk are of MBR types recognized by Windows or has a mapping specified using the /map command-line option

Conclusion: Your disk as-is cannot be converted to GPT. You will need to delete the extended partition, after saving all data.

Solution 2:

I want to convert my hard disk from MBR to GTP and hence I'm using mbr2gpt tool. But, for it to work I can have maximum 4 partitions (max. 3 primary). I actually have only 4 partitions but diskpart is shows that I have 5. It is labeling the same partition as two separate partitions (extended and logical).

This is normal. It's how logical partitions work, and it's how they bypass the "4 partition" limit in MBR – all of them actually exist inside the "extended" partition.

Normally the extended super-partition is not included in the partition count by most tools, but technically it still occupies a "primary" slot in the MBR.

So it seems to me that your disk actually satisfies the "maximum 4 partitions (max. 3 primary)" requirement... but that depends on whether mbr2gpt counts the extended partition as primary or not.

(It also seems to me that the requirement is a bit odd – maybe mbr2gpt is doing things a little backwards and trying to create EFI partitions before doing the actual MBR-to-GPT translation? You could actually bypass this by doing the conversion by hand using gdisk & bcdboot, like it was done for years before mbr2gpt.exe was added to Windows.)

Here's a snip of my Disk Management, which shows that I actually only have 4 partitions.

The dark green border you have around E: is actually the "Extended partition" indicator. It accurately represents that the "extended" partition reserves the entire remaining disk area that'll be used by logical partitions.