There are few things as frustrating as experiencing trouble with your computer’s hard drive, but is there a partitioning scheme that works better than an MBR-based one? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a curious reader’s question.
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
SuperUser reader Clay Nichols wants to know if GPT partitions are less likely to corrupt compared to MBR-based ones:
Are GPT partitions less likely to corrupt compared to MBR-based ones?
More partitions (128) Hard drives larger than 2TB
Are there any other benefits like less potential for corruption or are you just playing whack-a-mole where GPT can also become corrupted in the same way as MBR? The two hard drive failures I have experienced were due to corrupted MBRs.
The Answer
SuperUser contributor mtak has the answer for us:
Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here (URL of the original question/thread in this last sentence).
The redundancy is not available in the MBR partition scheme, which only occupies the first 512 bytes of a disk. The extra redundancy would allow for more resilience against corruption. The CRC32 checksum allows the system to detect which of the two headers is the correct, uncorrupted one if a problem arises so that it can be used to repair the other one.
Image Credit: GUID Partition Table Scheme by Kbolino (Wikipedia)
