The standard layout is:
- EFI System Partition (ESP) 100MB—or larger, but 100 is the default
- Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR) 128MB
- Windows partition (usually this will have drive letter C assigned to it)
- Recovery tools partition (WinRE)
- any additional partitions—usually one or more data partitions (optional)
UEFI/GPT-based hard drive partitions
learn.microsoft.com
The reddit post is not wrong, as it wouldn't have worked otherwise, but there are still a few things to want to consider. For starters, the reason why the Recovery partition is directly behind the Windows partition on a standard layout is to allow a Windows update to update WinRE. So whenever the Recovery partition needs to grow to make it possible, on a standard layout the update process will try to shrink the Windows partition to create unallocated space behind it. Next, the update procedure can remove the old Recovery partition. The result will be enough unallocated space directly behind the Windows partition to be able to create a new Recovery partition that will have the updated WinRE on it. So, this is how it works on Windows 11 by default.
That said, you could always decide to perform these kinds of operations with MiniTool Partition Wizard Free (portable). I use the portable because, unlike the non-portable, it doesn't have any ads, and there are no other differences besides this.
MiniTool Portable Partition Magic Brings Easier Disk Management
So, it's possible to re-arrange the partitions to match the standard layout, and it's fairly straightforward to do with MiniTool. Fairly. I will try to explain, but I will assume that the disk's partition style is already GPT so if you need to convert the disk from MBR to GPT first but you want to do it while avoiding to lose the data you've got stored on the disk, I won't explain how to do that in this thread. MiniTool also shows you whether the disk you have uses GPT.
You should be able to see in MiniTool that there's a 128MB MSR there. If it's only 16MB, I highly recommend to expand it to 128. If it's missing, you can create it, but in both cases you'll need enough unallocated space before the Windows partition to make the adjustment possible. And, if you want to reconstruct the standard layout, you also need to take into account that the EFI needs to be first, MSR second. However, you should also be aware that GPT reserves the first 34 sectors on the disk so you lose 17KB (as the sector size is 512 bytes) which translates to 1MB because partitions will be automatically aligned to 1MB boundaries. It means that the unallocated size required before the MSR to be able to create a new 100MB EFI is 101MB, or 229MB if you need to create
both the 100MB EFI
and the 128MB MSR. Just for the sake of long-windedness, the 34 sectors include:
- Protective MBR (sector 0)
- Primary GPT header (sector 1)
- Partition entry array (usually sectors 2–33)
- Alignment padding (optional, varies by tool)—as a general rule of thumb, the MSR does not need to be aligned, as it only reserves some space. So, if your MSR is the first partition on the disk, which is still a perfectly valid choice even though it doesn't match the standard layout from Microsoft mentioned above, that's when the alignment padding may be absent but your other partitions still need to be aligned to 1MB boundaries. Windows Setup and MiniTool or similar, modern, disk tools already align them automatically for you.
That said, when you're about to shrink a partition with MiniTool but you want the resulting unallocated space to wind up
before the partition. All you need to do in the Move/Resize dialog window is change the unit size (in the little dropdown list) from GB to MB for both the Unallocated Space Before and the Partition Size, then subtract the amount in Megabytes you need from the number you see in the Partition Size field, and manually enter the calculated result into the Partition Size field. Then manually enter the amount in Megabytes you need, into the Unallocated Space Before field. The Unallocated Size After field should automatically change to 0.
As for creating a new MSR. Remember that the MSR is not shown in Disk Management, but the DiskPart utility and tools like MiniTool still let you see it. To avoid getting in trouble, creating a new MSR if it is missing (or deleting the MSR before creating a new, 128MB one if it is only 16MB) should only be done while Windows is offline. As you probably know, you can boot to WinRE (or WinPE). From there, you can use a command prompt to run the necessary command:
create partition msr
To get to the command prompt in WinRE:
Open Command Prompt at Boot in Windows 11
