Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 11:34

This simple tutorial will explain how you can prepare a hard disk or a USB flash drive with GUID Partition Table (GPT) technology for the purpose of operating system installation on UEFI computer. You can read this before installing a GNU/Linux distribution to your modern PC and laptop. Good luck!


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Basic Knowlegde

For operating system installation activities today, there is a formula, saying more or less, MBR storage for BIOS Legacy computer and GPT storage for UEFI computer. Speaking simply, BIOS Legacy→MBR while UEFI→GPT. This is why if your computer is UEFI, your storage (hard disk, USB flash drive, SSD) should be GPT, before you install your operating system(s) on it. This is also why this tutorial exists to inform you how to format your hard disk as GUID Partition Table or GPT.

 

Preparation

Is your storage (hard disk, SSD, USB flash drive) already containing your working operating system? If it is, you must make backup of your data properly. If you don't do that, you cannot blame others if there is a mistake in your disk partitioning activity and you might loss all your data.

Create a USB bootable medium with Ubuntu operating system on it. To do so, if you have a Windows computer, learn here. If you have a GNU/Linux computer, learn here. If you do not have Ubuntu, you can download one here. Once a USB bootable is ready, continue to Step 1.


Step 1. Run A LiveCD

Boot up your Ubuntu bootable USB. Then continue to Step 2. Note: next time, when you got accustomed to do this activity, you will be able to do formatting without a LiveCD.

 

Step 2. Run Disks Utility

Open the start menu and access the hard disk or the USB flash drive you want to format. Picture below displays a selected hard disk drive by size 20GB with the partition table MBR (Master Boot Record). Continue to Step 3.

Step 3. Format

Click menu (triple dots button) → Format → first option, select Quick Format → second option, select GPT (Compatible with modern systems and hard disks) → click Format... → click Format once again to answer the question → wait for the process → finished formatting the disk storage. Now you should see The Result.


The Result

You should now see Partitioning: GUID Partition Table information of the storage and it should not be Master Boot Record. See picture below. This hard disk or USB flash drive is now ready for operating system installation in UEFI mode.



This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.