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Dynamic disks have been invented by Microsoft and are  deprecated in Windows and Microsoft no longer recommends using them.

 

1) Basic disk (A basic disk is a physical disk that contains a primary partition, an extended partition, or a logical drive. Partitions and logical drives on a basic disk are called basic volumes. )

 

Basic partition type A:  Master Boot Record (MBR) disk, you can create up to four primary partitions, or up to three primary partitions plus one extended partition. Within an extended partition, you can create multiple logical drives. And the maximum disk size of MBR is 2 TB. If it exceeds 2T, the extra part will be displayed as “unallocated“.

Basic Partition type B:  GUID partition table (GPT) disk, you can create up to 128 primary partitions. Since GPT disks do not limit four partitions, you do not have to create extended partitions or logical drives. And GPT has no size limit.

2) Dynamic disk  (dynamic disk support five types of volumes, and they are simple volumes, mirrored volumes, striped volumes, spanned volumes and RAID-5 volumes.)

 

dynamic partition type A:  Master Boot Record (MBR) disk,

dynamic  Partition type B:  GUID partition table (GPT) disk,

Windows 11 only boots from UEFI, which requires you to use the GPT disk as the system disk

 

 

If you have switched to dynamic disk then you must switch back to GPT but you must delete all the volumes on the dynamic disk before switching back.

or AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional  can convert dynamic disk into basic without deleting existing dynamic volumes within a few steps.

 

I used a one month license of EaseUS Partition Master at about 14CAD and it worked like a charm. It can move and resize partitions in one step and convert from (Universal to basic if needed) and GPT to MBR and reverse.

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Windows 10 needs a system partition (boot partition) other than the partition that contains \windows  and \system32 folders.

This partition is usually between 100 to 600MB.

Here is an example of a computer with many disks:

In the example above the bootable drive is disk 1

Disk1 is basic disk with MBR
the 600MB system reserved partition is NTFS the windows drive is also NTFS

In windows disk management it is seen as:

Although the C: partition shows boot, but actual master boot record is read from the  System reserved partition

It is important that System Reserved partition is Active

if System reserved is deleted or corrupted or does not exist when you have brought your windows files from another disk,

System reserved partition must be created, among many ways , it can be created by diskpart  (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/diskpart)

Since bootrec.exe is a 32 bit program you must boot the computer a recovery disk and use the command prompt of the recovery disk or usb

it can be created by RecoveryDrive.exe  from C:\Windows\System32

 

if there is only one disk

Then:
diskpart
select disk 0
select partition 1
active

exit

bootrec /fixmbr	(/FixMbr allows the repair of a corrupted or damaged Master Boot Record. And you should use it when you meet one of these error messages: “Operating System not found”, “Error loading operating system”, “Missing operating system” or “Invalid partition table”.)
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
bcdboot    e:\Windows   /l en-us     /s     n:     /f      ALL	if your system reserved drive is volume labeled: n  and your windows is on e

Master Boot Record (MBR) is where partitions are defined

The MBR resides at the very beginning of the hard disk and it holds the information on how the logical partitions are organized in the storage device. In addition, the MBR also contains executable code that can scan the partitions for the active OS and load up the boot up code/procedure for the OS.

For a MBR disk (a disk in which the partitions defined in MBR), you can only have four primary partitions. To create more partitions, you can set the fourth partition as the extended partition and you will be able to create more sub-partitions (or logical drives) within it. As MBR uses 32-bit to record the partition, each partition can only go up to a maximum of 2TB in size. This is how a typical MBR disk layout looks like:

UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) stores all the information about initialization and startup in an .efi file. This file is stored on the hard drive inside a special partition called EFI System Partition (ESP). The ESP partition also contains the boot loader programs for the Operating System installed on the computer.

Instead of Master Boot Record (MBR) UEFI stores  the  information about the hard drive data in the GUID partition table (GPT). The major difference between the two is that MBR uses 32-bit entries in its table which limits the total physical partitions to only 4. Each partition can only be a maximum of 2TB in size, while GPT uses 64-bit entries in its table which dramatically extends the support for size possibilities of the hard drive. (More on difference between MBR and GPT).

The EFI system partition (ESP), a small partition formatted with FAT32, is usually around 100MB, this is where the EFI boot loaders and applications used by the firmware at system during start-up are stored. If your hard drive is in the GUID Partition table (GPT) partition style, it will automatically generate an EFI system partition after you have installed your operating systems.

Usually, you will generate an EFI system partition after installing Windows on a GPT disk.

The EFI system partition must to be formatted to FAT32 while Windows must be installed to a partition formatted as NTFS. 

 

1. Boot your computer from a Windows installation disc or recovery disk. Press Shift+F10 during the setup to enter the command prompt.

2. Run the commands below to shrink the partition to free up some unallocated space.

 ▪diskpart

▪ list disk

▪select disk X (X represents the disk number of the disk that requires an EFI partition)

▪list partition

▪select partition N (N represents the partition number of the partition that needs shrinking)

▪shrink desired=500 (shrink the partition by 500MB)

3. Then you can create EFI partition out of the 500MB unallocated space using the command below:

▪create partition EFI size=200

▪format quick fs=fat32 label=”System”

▪create partition msr size = 128

4. After those two partitions have been successfully created, use the commands below to install boot loader and other applications needed.

▪bootrec /fixboot

▪bcdboot c:\Windows /s b: /f ALL

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Clone: Cloning Hard Disk Drives SSDs:

I suggest using AOMEI Backupper Standard Free,

it works even if the source is bigger than dist but dist has enough space

Before cloning make sure that disk type of the empty destination disk is the same as the source:

GPT-GPT

MBR-MBR

 

Unlike Macrium reflect that stops at the first readdisk error it can be used on a computer where the source and destination are connected as peripherals and copies everything including OS
The professional version is expensive ($50) but might be the sames as others when on sale I saw one as:
AOMEI Backupper Professional + Free Lifetime Upgrade – Lifetime Free Upgrades at CAD 53

https://www.ubackup.com/standard-upgrade.html

no bootable device can be found after disk cloning

 

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface UEFI boots from an EFI system partition on GPT disk. 

 

– Boot the computer using the Windows  installation media.
– bring up the command prompt.
– Run the following commands at the command prompt.

diskpart
list disk
select disk 0 Note: Select the disk where you want to add the EFI System partition.
list partition

 

Only IF YOU NEED SPACE TO CREATE AND EFI PARTITION
select partition 1     Note: Select the  partition (# number) or your data partition you want to shrink
shrink desired=900    Note: Shrinks the selected volume to desiredsize in megabytes

only if efi partition does not exist on the cloned destination
create partition efi size=100
format quick fs=fat32

assign letter=k
list partition
list volume Note: Note the volume letter where the Windows OS is installed.
exit

bcdboot D:\windows /s k:
Note: Replace “D” with the volume letter of the Windows OS partition, k: is your efi partition

BCDBoot copies the boot files from the Windows partition to the EFI System partition and creates the BCD store in the same partition.

Boot Configuration Data (BCD) is a firmware-independent database for boot-time configuration data. It is used by Microsoft’s new Windows Boot Manager and replaces the boot. ini that was used by NTLDR.

For UEFI boot, the file is located at /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/BCD on the EFI System Partition.