MBR2GPT - EFI Partition Positioned AFTER OS ???

Hello Everyone,

After more than a decade, I am transitioning to a new motherboard.
My old motherboard and GPU, which I am typing on right now, do not support UEFI.
So, I put my new motherboard in a new enclosure with new GPU, power supply etc.

Eventually I will be moving my SSD drive(s) from the old enclosure into the new one.

To test out that everything will work okay, I used Macrium Reflect 8.x to backup an image of one of my SSD's
[all my SSD's can be turned off or on when the system is powered down and I never run more than one at a time]
and I restored one of those images to a test SSD that I have connected in the new enclosure.

To my amazement, Windows 10 Pro 64 bit booted and loaded essential drivers.
I was able to load the remaining missing drivers and the system works great.

The system is set to boot either BIOS/MBR or UEFI/GPT.
I ran mbr2gpt.exe successfully except that problem everyone has where the Recovery Partition does not update the info and is just a formatted empty partition.

I followed the tutorial on the Ten Forums to create new Recovery Partition info.

Now here is where my questions occur.

Q1. Minitool shows information in the Recovery and EFI partitions, but Disk Management shows 100% Free.
See jpg attached.




Is this an error or just a quirk of Windows 10 ?

Q2. I notice that the EFI partition is after the Windows partition. Most graphical examples show the EFI partition as the very first one on a disk. Is this an error ? Will it be a problem ? Or is this just because I have a Data partition on my disk which most setups do not ?

Thanks for any insight you can offer.

Because the recovery and EFI partitions are marked as system partitions, native Windows will not see files and folders in them so Windows shows them as 100% free.

The EFI System Partition can be anywhere on the disk. After the OS is where mbr2gpt creates it. Also you will notice you do not have the Microsoft System Reserved (MSR) partition that MS claims is necessary on a GPT disk, which obviously is false.

Thank you, NavyLCDR for the prompt reply and the very reassuring information.

I was wondering if I was going to have to go through some obtuse series of commands to correct this setup,
and I am glad it is okay as it stands.

Many thanks !