Server disk manager tool Disk Management is capable of converting a disk from MBR to GPT on the premise of an empty disk and confirmation on deleting everything, which most of the users would like to keep. Partition Expert provides and solution to convert MBR disk to GPT disk without data loss.
Besides, Disk Management can’t convert NTFS file system to FAT32 without data loss, the only way to get FAT32 again is to format the partition, which is another thing users would hope to avoid. Partition Expert is tool that makes this conversion possible and safe.
The followings are some resources for the convert operations for Windows Server Disk:
When initialized disk to MBR disk and partitioned, convert to GPT disk option will grey out unless you delete all of the partitions and make entire disk unallocated space again. However, delete all partitions are troublesome and impossible for disk contains system; we need to do the conversion without losing data or system.
May you already know how to solve the Disk management convert to GPT disk option greyed out problem in Windows Server 2012 R2, we can actually use Partition Expert to completely replace Server disk management, taking converting to GPT disk operation for example, Partition Expert can finish the conversion without losing data while Disk management has no option but to delete all partitions on the MBR disk.
Windows Disk Management cannot convert NTFS to FAT32 but only able to reformat an NTFS partition to FAT32, although we can get FAT32 in this way, we lose all data on the partition. Even after we had a backup and we’re 100% sure we get restore data, it’s the time we don’t want to cost. Few GBs are OK, but what if data capacity went up to TBs?
The number of primary partitions in MBR disk can only reach to 4, so if you want to create more partitions, Create New Volume will grey out in Disk management unless you make one of the primary partitions to the extended partition, so you can create more logical partitions. In this snap-in tool, there are no ways to make a logical partition out of primary partitions unless you delete one of them.