GUID Partition Table - Legacy MBR (LBA 0)

Legacy MBR (LBA 0)

Traditionally, in IBM PC compatible systems the first sector of the disk holds the Master Boot Record (MBR), containing the drive's partitioning information and the code of the first stage boot loader for BIOS-based systems. For limited backward compatibility, this sector is still reserved for a MBR in the GPT specification, but it is now used in a way that prevents MBR-based disk utilities from mis-recognizing, and possibly over-writing, GPT disks. This is referred to as a "protective MBR".

A single partition type of EEh, encompassing the entire GPT drive, is indicated and identifies it as GPT. Operating systems and tools which cannot read GPT disks will generally recognize the disk as containing one partition of unknown type and no empty space, and will typically refuse to modify the disk unless the user explicitly requests and confirms the deletion of this partition. This minimizes accidental erasures. Furthermore, GPT-aware OSes will check the protective MBR and if the enclosed partition type is not of type EEh or if there are multiple partitions defined on the target device, the device should not be manipulated.

While the MBR layout (and also the protective MBR layout) was defined around a sector size of 512 bytes per sector, the actual sector size can be larger on various media such as MO disks or hard disks with Advanced Format. Extra space in the MBR typically remains unused.

If the actual size of the disk exceeds the maximum partition size representable using the legacy 32-bit LBA entries in the MBR partition table, the recorded size of this partition is clipped at the maximum, thereby ignoring the rest of disk. This amounts to a maximum reported size of 2 TiB, assuming a disk with 512 bytes per sector (see 512e). It would result in 16 TiB with 4 KB sectors (4Kn), but since many older operating systems and tools are hard-wired for a sector size of 512 bytes or are limited to 32-bit calculations, exceeding the 2 TiB limit would cause serious compatibility problems.

In operating systems that support GPT-based boot through BIOS services rather than EFI, the first sector is also still used to store the first stage of the bootloader code, but modified to recognize GPT partitions. The boot loader in the MBR must not assume a fixed sector size of 512 bytes / sector.

Apple's Boot Camp Intel based Apple macs software creates a hybrid partition table to allow the booting of Windows (which at the time of Boot Camp's creation did not support GPT or EFI). In this system the protective partition is reduced in size to cover from sector 1 to the sector before the first regular partition included in the hybrid MBR. Additional MBR partitions are then defined to correspond to the next three GPT partitions.