I wanted to upgrade my system drive. I had been running two 250GB SSDs in RAID 0 and I was running out of space. I purchased a 1TB SSD and cloned it. I followed instructions for resizing the C drive given in a Macrium tutorial video (Cloning a disk using Macrium Reflect 7) available on Youtube. After installing the cloned drive, my computer would go directly to the BIOS setup utility. No boot options were available. Then I found a video that explained how to get your system partition to align properly (UPDATE: Using Macrium Reflect Free to Clone Windows to a Bootable M.2 SSD). I followed the procedure in this video and was able to boot from my new 1TB drive.

My question now is why is there a difference between the way Macrium Reflect displays the partitions versus Windows Disk Management. There are only four partitions shown in Disk Management but there are five shown in Reflect. The "DATA" drive is an HDD.


I'm also wondering about the recovery partitions (partitions 4 and 5). Are they necessary for a normal boot?

Microsoft hide a small MSR type partition in disk management for GPT disks, however, it's there so Macrium displays it.

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Cuznbroosie - 3 January 2021 5:53 PM

I wanted to upgrade my system drive. I had been running two 250GB SSDs in RAID 0 and I was running out of space. I purchased a 1TB SSD and cloned it. I followed instructions for resizing the C drive given in a Macrium tutorial video (Cloning a disk using Macrium Reflect 7) available on Youtube. After installing the cloned drive, my computer would go directly to the BIOS setup utility. No boot options were available. Then I found a video that explained how to get your system partition to align properly (UPDATE: Using Macrium Reflect Free to Clone Windows to a Bootable M.2 SSD). I followed the procedure in this video and was able to boot from my new 1TB drive.

My question now is why is there a difference between the way Macrium Reflect displays the partitions versus Windows Disk Management. There are only four partitions shown in Disk Management but there are five shown in Reflect. The "DATA" drive is an HDD.


I'm also wondering about the recovery partitions (partitions 4 and 5). Are they necessary for a normal boot?

Most likely what you're missing in Disk Management is the MSR Reserved partition which is purposely hidden. Reflect will show this partition as do some disk partitioning tools. The MSR partition on my machine is 128MB.. It is created to reserve a portion of the disk space for possible subsequent usage by the Windows Operating System.

Chances are that only one of the two Recovery partitions at the end are needed — you’d have to do some digging to figure that out — but the first 3 plus a Recovery partition are the standard setup for a UEFI system, and as mentioned, Windows Disk Management for some reason hides the MSR partition. This is true even on non-OS GPT disks initialized by Windows, where the MSR partition is the first partition on disk. Your Data disk doesn’t have one, so it probably wasn’t first initialized by a Windows system. For OS disks it’s meant to be just after the EFI partition, as it is in your screenshot.

Thanks to everyone for the quick response.

Happy New Year!