GPT utility can brick laptops? Which utility is Android-x86 using for partitions?  Is it gdisk?  The prompt is to use GPT.  What are the risks with regards to formatting a disk with this tool, and installing Android-x86?  Under which circumstances can this result in bricking a laptop?  Deleting partitions will result in bricking the laptop??

GPT seems to operate a bit differently from the last time I formatted a HD by hand, which involved the MBR.  (There's no data on the hdd.)

The official documentation glosses over the install process with sentences like "if you are lucky" so it's a bit unclear.
We all know that the matter concerning bricking a device is complex and often confusing, so let's make some clearance.
Meaning of bricking
Bricking, if considered literally, means &quot;to have a device so unusable it could be a brick&quot;. This, on mobile devices, is an umbrella term for two different things:

soft brick: as a result of flashing or alternatively installing incompatible software, your device gets messed up. This can produce behaviours such as bootloops, but can generally be solved by flashing a new firmware, or restoring a working Nandroid backup (if any);

hard brick: this is the &quot;bad&quot; kind of brick. You messed up a component known as the bootloader, and now the device doesn't even know how to turn itself on.


Since all of the partitions on a mobile device are contained within the same physical medium (internal storage), in this case messing up with its partitions can lead to hard bricks.
On PCs and laptops
Those devices are physically different from mobile ones... yes, even inside. Their core software component, which does a job similar to the mobile bootloader, is called the BIOS (on old devices), or the UEFI (on newer devices).
This is what sends the signal that pings all of the hardware connected with a computer, and therefore the most important part. As such, it's contained within a small memory that's entirely dedicated to it. This memory was previously called ROM (Read-Only Memory), even if we now have EEPROMs (Electrically Erasable Programmable ROM). As you may guess, the only way to make a computer totally unusable would be to overwrite the content of this chip, for example when updating the BIOS.

So, can I brick my computer by altering the partition table?
No, you can't. All of your changes only affect the Hard Disk or Solid State Disk in question, so they may mess up your current operating system, but that's nothing that can't be fixed by simply reinstalling it.