Think I finally have my boot drive squared away

Just a silly observation here...but isn't the computer in question working just fine without the MSR partition?

Ztruker said:

Surely with the attention to detail you've shown you can understand why I want this to look right, even if it doesn't make any functional difference?

What am I missing if I don't have the MSR partition?
What won't work.

So far, I've not found anything that was not working correctly.

Just because Windows creates something automatically does not mean it is "right". What is right to me is that everything works the way that I want it to with the setup that I want to have.

The MSR appears to be free space that will be farmed out for future changes to the drive's partitioning:
Windows and GPT FAQ - Windows 10 hardware dev

The Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR) reserves space on each disk drive for subsequent use by operating system software. ... For example, converting a basic disk to a dynamic disk causes the MSR on that disk to be reduced in size and a newly created partition holds the dynamic disk database.

My feeling is that I am not planning on changing the way my current system operates regarding the disk partitions, so I don't feel the need to keep the MSR on it.

This statement from the same link:

Every GPT disk must contain an MSR.

Is obviously false at this point in time. I've got two laptops with UEFI bios and GPT disks that run just fine without the MSR partition - and seems like yours is/was running just fine without it as well.

Now, that being said, there have been people who have had upgrades to Windows 10 fail because their System Reserved partition (not to be confused with MSR - two different partitions) were too small and they had to use something like MiniTool Partition Wizard to make room for and expand the System Reserved partition. So my feeling is if at some point I discover that Windows complains about not having Microsoft's precious reserved disk space, I'll make it when I am forced to.

NavyLCDR said:

Just because Windows creates something automatically does not mean it is "right". What is right to me is that everything works the way that I want it to with the setup that I want to have.

The MSR appears to be free space that will be farmed out for future changes to the drive's partitioning:
Windows and GPT FAQ - Windows 10 hardware dev



My feeling is that I am not planning on changing the way my current system operates regarding the disk partitions, so I don't feel the need to keep the MSR on it.

This statement from the same link:



Is obviously false at this point in time. I've got two laptops with UEFI bios and GPT disks that run just fine without the MSR partition - and seems like yours is/was running just fine without it as well.

Now, that being said, there have been people who have had upgrades to Windows 10 fail because their System Reserved partition (not to be confused with MSR - two different partitions) were too small and they had to use something like MiniTool Partition Wizard to make room for and expand the System Reserved partition. So my feeling is if at some point I discover that Windows complains about not having Microsoft's precious reserved disk space, I'll make it when I am forced to.

You actually only need the EFI partition and C Drive partition as a minimum.