I want to know how to convert a SINGLE drive partition only from GPT to MBR without making any kind of changes on other drives which are in GPT. This means that no data should be affected on other drives except the one which I want to convert to MBR.
Actually, I have Windows 10 installed and I'm interested in installing Windows 7 on a separate drive partition, but the problem is that when I'm about to install on a separate drive, it gives me the error "The selected disk is of GPT style partition"
For this reason, I'm interested in converting that single drive into MBR to install Windows 7.
Best Answer
Let's be careful about drives vs. partitions. A drive is an entire physical storage device: a hard disk drive. A drive is something you can hold in your hand.
The storage space on the drive may be divided up into one or more partitions. Partitions are not drives, they are sections of drives. You cannot hold a partition in your hand.
GPT and MBR are drive-level partition table formats that affect the whole hard disk drive. It's how you tell your system what the partitions on the drive are, how big they are, and where they start and end.
The ancient partition table format from the 1980's IBM PC BIOS firmware era is MBR. The modern format from the 2000's Intel [U]EFI firmware era is GPT.
A drive could either have only an MBR table, or it could have only a GPT table, or it could be a hybrid containing both.
One form of hybrid is primarily GPT but has a "Protective MBR" or "PMBR": a fake MBR that tells non-GPT-aware software that the whole disk is allocated to an unknown partition type. This keeps non-GPT-aware software from thinking the disk is unformatted and trying to format it.
Another form of hybrid is a disk that has both a GPT and an MBR, where the formatting/partitioning software has tried to keep them both in sync. So MBR-only software learns about all the same partitions that GPT-only software learns about.
You can make a GPT-only drive into a hybrid, but since this concept is at the whole-disk level and not the individual-partition level, you can't make a single partition be MBR.
Partitions have a different set of formats, such as FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, HFS+, and others. These are choices that affect individual partitions, not the whole disk drive.