Mounir IDRASSI - 2026-06-01

Thanks for the detailed diagnostics. They make the cause clear.

The message comes from a current VeraCrypt system encryption requirement that the first 63 sectors of the physical disk be free of any partition. In byte terms, the first partition on the drive must start at or after byte 32256. This check is performed before the UEFI/GPT specific logic, so it isn't caused by VeraCrypt mistaking your system for BIOS/MBR (error message need to be enhanced).

On your disk, the first partition is the Microsoft Reserved Partition, and it starts at byte 17408 (sector 34), the earliest position allowed by GPT. Because 17408 is below the required 32256, VeraCrypt refuses to continue. The 32 MB of unallocated space between the MSR and the Windows partition doesn't help, because the required free area must be at the very beginning of the disk.

For comparison, a standard modern Windows UEFI installation normally starts the first partition at the 1 MiB boundary, sector 2048, which easily satisfies this requirement. Your layout is unusual because the first partition starts at the GPT minimum, which explains why this case is rarely seen.

The duplicate EFI System Partitions and the mbr2gpt /validate failure aren't the cause of this particular message, although having two ESPs on the same disk isn't a recommended Windows layout and may cause separate boot-management issues.

I previously attempted to drop this 32 KiB requirement for GPT systems for that reason, but that change had to be reverted because more work is needed to remove the requirement safely without regressions.

The practical workaround is to recreate or move the GPT layout so that no partition starts within the first 32 KiB of the disk. In practice, use the standard 1 MiB-aligned start for the first partition.