Solved Macrium Reflect Free shows 3 partitions?


wiganken

wiganken

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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?

DM 2 Partitions.png

MR 3 Partitions.png
 

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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.
 

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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.
 

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    Windows 11 ProAMD Ryzen 9 8945HS32GB DDR5 SO-DIMMIntegrated AMD Radeon 780M (4.00 GHz)
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    Windows 11 Pro
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    AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS
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    Windows 11 HomeIntel® Core™ Ultra 7 - 255H processor16 GB LPDDR5 SDRAMIntel Arc 140T onboard graphics
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    Windows 11 Home
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    Laptop
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    ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED 14" Laptop - UX3405CA-QL192W
    CPU
    Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 - 255H processor
    Memory
    16 GB LPDDR5 SDRAM
    Graphics card(s)
    Intel Arc 140T onboard graphics
    Screen Resolution
    1920 x 1200 (16:10 WUXGA resolution) OLED Touchscreen
    Hard Drives
    1TB SSD
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.

00000 Default Windows partitions.png


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

000000 Disk Management 2.png



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...

000000 MACRIUM 2.png


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. :-)
 
Last edited:

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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.
 

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Windows 11 Pro + Win11 Canary VM.
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Manufacturer/Model
ASUS Zenbook 14
CPU
I9 13th gen i9-13900H 2.60 GHZ
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Yep, Laptop has one.
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TPM 2.0, 2xUSB4 thunderbolt, 1xUsb3 (usb a), 1xUsb-c, hdmi out, 3.5 mm audio out/in combo, ASUS backlit trackpad (inc. switchable number pad)

Macrium Reflect Home V8
Office 365 Family (6 users each 1TB onedrive space)
Hyper-V (a vm runs almost as fast as my older laptop)
Thanks everyone. I'll leave it as-is.
 

My Computers My Computers

System One System Two

  • At a glance

    Windows 11 ProAMD Ryzen 9 8945HS32GB DDR5 SO-DIMMIntegrated AMD Radeon 780M (4.00 GHz)
    OS
    Windows 11 Pro
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    Manufacturer/Model
    GMKtec K11
    CPU
    AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS
    Memory
    32GB DDR5 SO-DIMM
    Graphics Card(s)
    Integrated AMD Radeon 780M (4.00 GHz)
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Benq 2250HM
    Screen Resolution
    1920 x 1080
    Hard Drives
    1 TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD

  • At a glance

    Windows 11 HomeIntel® Core™ Ultra 7 - 255H processor16 GB LPDDR5 SDRAMIntel Arc 140T onboard graphics
    Operating System
    Windows 11 Home
    Computer type
    Laptop
    Manufacturer/Model
    ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED 14" Laptop - UX3405CA-QL192W
    CPU
    Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 - 255H processor
    Memory
    16 GB LPDDR5 SDRAM
    Graphics card(s)
    Intel Arc 140T onboard graphics
    Screen Resolution
    1920 x 1200 (16:10 WUXGA resolution) OLED Touchscreen
    Hard Drives
    1TB SSD
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.
 

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    ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero (WiFi)
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    Windows 11 EducationIntel i7-8550U32GBNvidia Geforce MX150
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    Windows 11 Education
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    Laptop
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    Dell Inspiron 7773
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    Intel i7-8550U
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    32GB
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    Nvidia Geforce MX150
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    Realtek
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    17"
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    1920 x 1080
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    Toshiba 512GB NVMe SSD
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    Fast!
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