I have a UEFI mobo. Installed Mint 17.1 iso from DVD onto 240GB SSD. It installed with a MBR. I wanted GPT. Why is this happening? Can i safely convert to GPT? If not, how can i re-install to insure i get GPT. All my components are new from Newegg as of about two months ago. I just don't want old software technology like MBR.

Hi & Welcome to Linux Questions.

I've never tried my hand at GPT partitioning but these links are a start.

I think the only time you have to perform GPT partitioning is if you have a 2 TB HDD or higher.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=96276
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...artition_Table
http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials...e-ancient-mbr-
http://forums.justlinux.com/showthre...T-partitioning

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Is this an internal or external drive?
Was it originally gpt?
You can make any drive GPT or MBR, although I'm not sure if you can do it without losing data.
There are tutorials that claim you can do it though.
You can format the drive to gpt with Gparted-live-cd/usb

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It is possible to covert an MBR disk to GPT using gdisk -- just start it up for the drive in question and it will offer to convert the table:
Where <x> is the letter assigned to your drive -- use `lsblk` to check this.

Make sure you are booting in EFI-mode before trying this: check if you have a /sys/firmware/efi on your system.

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I've installed as efi once. You must have a GPT disk for the main boot hard disk.
I found it to be a real pain.

A GPT disk has a small amount of extra space used at the beginning and end of the disk.
It is better, especially if you have lots of partitions.

If the disk is reasonably new, it will have 4K hardware sectors - but support logical 512byte sectors.
Therefore, it is good to start your filesystems on 4K boundaries...

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Thanks for all of these quick replies to my problem. I initially installed my Mint 17.1 onto a 500GB HD from a (i think FAT32) USB stick. Worked fine. Then i bought a 240GB SSD (only $100!) and installed to the SSD. Or so i thought. It installed to the HD. I didn't see any option that let me choose where i installed it to. OK. Power down. Disconnect HD. Try install again. Now it's running fine but the Disks app shows "Partitioning: Master Boot Record". Since my mobo has UEFI, i'm running Haswell, it's a current Linux distro, i have the afore-mentioned SSD, in short, everything is as up-to-date as possible - why should i not have GUID Partition Table instead of a Master Boot Record. I'm not afraid of losing data. Can someone tell me what to change so that when i re-install it (again) GPT will finally be there? And to those who have send many replies, sorry but i haven't read all of them yet, not tried all of them, but i will be doing this in a few minutes.

Possibly it's a good idea to swap the SATA cables, so that your SSD is sda and the hard disk is sdb.
(Just for simplicity - its not necessary).

It shows partioning MBR becauseost drives are formatted for MBR by default unless you bought it specifically for a mac computer. In order to format to Gpt you have to either use the disk manager in your ubuntu install, wins or a 3rd party partitioning software.

MBR is the default unless the disk is >2 TB. If you have to use GPT, then boot to a live session of whatever Linux distro you want, and use gparted to partition the disk as desired. Then when you go to install the OS, just choose the partition(s) you created and tell it not to format.

The drive must be formatted first & partitioning can be done while installing.