GUID partition table (part of EFI) vs MBR (master boot record)

In computer hardware, GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a standard for the layout of the partition table on a physical hard disk. It is a part of the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) standard proposed by Intel as a replacement for the PC BIOS, one of the few remaining parts of the original IBM PC. EFI uses GPT whereas BIOS uses a Master Boot Record (MBR).

Diagram illustrating the layout of the GUID Partition Table scheme. In this example, each logical block (LBA) is 512 bytes in size, and each partition entry is 128 bytes. LBA addresses that are negative indicate position from the end of the volume, with −1 being the last addressable block.

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Features

Current PC BIOS schemes use a master boot record (MBR) to begin the process of initializing the disk. The MBR begins with an entry called the Master Boot Code, which contains an executable binary for the purpose of identifying and booting the active partition. EFI instead contains this capability itself, but to maintain backwards compatibility, GPT retains the MBR entry as the first sector on the disk followed by a Primary Partition Table Header, the actual beginning of GPT.

GPT uses modern logical block addressing (LBA) in place of the cylinder-head-sector (CHS) addressing used with MBR. Legacy MBR information is contained in LBA 0, the GPT header is in LBA 1, and the partition table itself follows. In 64-bit Windows operating systems, 16,384 bytes, or 32 sectors, are reserved for the GPT, leaving LBA 34 as the first usable sector on the disk.

According to Apple^[1], "Do not assume that the {LBA} size is always going to be 512 bytes." When booting an Intel-based Mac from a hard drive that is partitioned, the hard disk must be partitioned according to GPT, rather than Apple Partition Map.

GPT also provides for redundancy. The GPT header and partition table are written at both the beginning and end of the disk.