What I can't understand is why MSI decided to create this 900 MB recovery partition between partitions 3 and 5 (drive C and D)? There is no way for me to combine them into one large usable partition. Now I would prefer the MSI recovery image partition to be at the start of the drive before the OS partition but it's not a big deal.
My SSD now consists of 6 partitions shown in the attached image. Later I will be shrinking it to create two more partitions for a Linux installation. I wiped the HDD and created just one partition for now. The laptop now has the SSD and a 1 TB HDD (original OS installation).
Just installed a 512 GB M.2 2280 SSD in a new GE72 and recovered the OS from a USB backup created with MSI Burn Recovery.