Here’s the tech scenario: I now have seven active Seagate Barracuda SATA2 500GB drives in a RAID5 array, using a Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 card. This setup gives a total capacity of 3TB and can survive one drive completely dying.

Under Windows, drives are formatted with a Master Boot Record partition map. This format imposes a 2TB limitation on allocatable space within a volume. I was unaware of this limit when I set up the RAID card, and am now paying the price.

The problem is that now, I have 750GB of unallocatable space on my RAID volume. I can’t extend the existing partition or even create a new one, with a wonderfully incomprehensible error message leading the way.

Supposedly, this problem can be fixed by using a GUID Partition Table (GPT) setup. Unfortunately, GPT conversion requires an empty volume – and I have 2TB of data that can’t really be moved anywhere else.

Anyone know of a utility (open source, freeware, paid) to convert MBR to GPT? I’ve actually read the GPT specification and it doesn’t seem too difficult to implement, but I really don’t want to get into hex editing the raw disk for various reasons.