I thought I'd finally relegated Windows to life inside a virtual machine, but alas, I came across some games I'd like to play that just won't do in that setup. In the days since Windows last occupied its own specified chunk of my disk I've done a lot of flipping around with different OSes and Linux distributions, and it turned out that while I had free space, I was at the maximum number of partitions supported by MBR partition tables. So, believing that it should Just Work® here in the 21st century and having performed a cursory examination of Google that indicated it should work, I converted over to a GUID partition table (GPT) and attempted to install Windows 7. Lo and behold, Windows 7 only works with GPTs on EFI systems, and mine uses BIOS. I should have noticed this in my earlier research, but that would have just been too easy.
So, I'm left with the choice of converting back to MBR and trying to jigger my partition layout around such that I can make one for Windows, or going with a hybrid MBR. The latter sounds more appealing. Unfortunately, there are lots of scary warnings about hybrid MBRs on the Internet, so I have a few questions.
Will Windows do something ugly to my bootloader since it's really on GPT but it will see MBR? Will that require more repair than booting from a LiveCD and running grub-install? Is there anything I need to avoid other than making sure I never touch partitioning tools on Windows? Will my computer explode? Would lots of headaches be saved if I just switched back to MBR? (I understand that Macs use hybrid MBRs with Boot Camp, so hopefully this won't be as difficult as I'm making it out to be.)
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