Missing MSR partition on UEFI/GPT Boot drive (only 3 partitions)

Hi, I'm just noticed my home PC only has 3 partitions on my 1-Tb boot drive that I recently (2 months back?) upgraded to Windows 11. My cloned back up also only has 3 partitions, also missing the MSR partition. I always have 2 drives, one in the computer and one that I use for making a cloned backup. I guess my fault for not checking, but they always worked....so I checked my older drives that had cloned dates on them of 2020 and 2021, that I had used to clone to the new 1-Tb drives and just tossed those 500-gb ones in my drawer....and they also only have 3 partitions, also missing the MSR partition. So whatever the cause, it hasn't given me any problems for 2-3 years. So should I be concerned? And I checked my computer at work and it HAS 4 partitions, including the MSR partition?????

Hello @pmm Welcome to Eleven Forum.





It's nothing to worry about.
And if desired, one can be created on the drives that don't have one...

Do I really need an MSR partition - Windows 11




I only have TWO of the default partitions on mine... and my computer works just fine.

Please post images or share links of disk management using one drive, drop box, or google drive.

By default disk management has compressed rows and columns and characters are cutoff.

a) widen these rows: disk 0, disk 1, disk 2, disk 3, etc > make sure that no characters are cutoff

b) widen these columns: Volume and Status > make sure that no characters are cutoff






Run:

diskpar info
tuneup plus



Post share links into this thread using one drive, drop box, or google drive.

Just to add, how are you viewing the partitions, not all apps will show all partitions, including Windows disk manager. Try Diskpart or Macrium Reflect or similar to list the disk structure.

I was curious about the same thing and stumbled across this post. The OP is correct, there doesn't seem to be an MSR partition for Win11. Here's what mine looks like and it's the same on two machines that I've recently upgraded from Win10 to Win11.

The thing to note here is that the systems have been updated to Windows 11, it is entirely possible there was no MSR partition when on Win10.
I have a clean installed Win11 and it definitely made an MSR on the system drive and all 7 other drives when they were wiped then partitioned or initialised and partitioned for this system.

If you use mbr2gpt to convert an MBR drive to GPT, MS does not create the MSR partition. It's absence is nothing to be concerned about.