Solved Macrium Reflect Free shows 3 partitions?

Sorry if this has been posted before. Windows 'Disk Management' shows 2 partitions but MR shows 3 partitions. Does anyone know what is happening here?

Which is correct and does it matter?

wiganken said:

Does anyone know what is happening here?

Click to expand...

Nothing is happening. The 16MB Reserve partition is "hidden" in Disk Management.
That's normal.

Ghot said:

The 16MB Reserve partition is "hidden" in Disk Management.

Click to expand...

Okay. Thanks.
Out of interest I see this 16MB partition shows as 'Unformatted' or is that Macrium terminology for 'Hidden'?
If it really is unformatted have you any idea what is it used for?
Not important. Just interested.

wiganken said:

Okay. Thanks.
Out of interest I see this 16MB partition shows as 'Unformatted' or is that Macrium terminology for 'Hidden'?
If it really is unformatted have you any idea what is it used for?
Not important. Just interested.

Click to expand...

It's a "reserved" partition for future use by Microsoft.
I believe the Reserved partition first appeared in Windows 7, and has been with us, ever since.




You absolutely need the EFI and the Windows partitions, to boot Windows.
Personally, I just removed the other ones on my system...





When you choose this option in Macrium... it automatically check marks all the default Windows partitions it can see. That is why it "sees" the Reserved partition, among others...




It's designed that way, to be able to "restore" Windows, exactly as it found it.

The folks that wrote Macrium Reflect, knew that not everyone would have all four default Windows partitions. So they needed to come up with a way to... cover all bases.

So they gave Macrium the ability to see "all" the partitions.



By the way... if you had a Recovery partition... Macrium would show that also.

Hi @wiganken

For further reading: Microsoft Reserved Partition - Wikipedia.

Back in days of legacy bios pcs, some game vendors made use of "hidden" mbr sectors to install copy protection features.

So if somebody copies the game, they cannot run it as they do not have the hidden data.

UEFI GPT pcs do not have such hidden sectors, so MS introduced a hidden partition instead but games vendors never used it - many now check online for a valid licence for example.

So, it is prettty useless and safely deleted. If you ever should need it again, it is easy to recreate using diskpart.

Thanks everyone. I'll leave it as-is.

And it is also interesting to note that if you use Microsoft's own tool, mbr2gpt, to convert an MBR disk to GPT, the MSR partition does not get created. Even though MS in some documentation claims the MSR is "required" on GPT disks, their own tool does not create it when converting.