Clone Windows 10 to a New Hard Drive Without Reinstallation (Safe Boot)

Does your computer fall into the low disk space problem? Do you spend several minutes waiting for the computer to boot or load an application? Such situations are annoying. How to deal with them?

Upgrading your computer hard drive is the answer. For more storage space, you can upgrade your current drive to a larger drive. For faster read and write speed, you can replace an HDD with an SSD. Then, another question comes: how to transfer OS and data from one hard drive to another?

You may think about the traditional copy-and-paste method. However, it would be time-consuming to transfer a mass of data by “copy” and “paste”. Also, you can’t copy system files to another drive directly, or you’ll encounter boot errors.

What’s the correct way to transfer everything from the old hard drive to a new drive? Disk clone serves this purpose. As Windows doesn’t offer a “clone” feature, you’ll need a third-party disk cloning utility.

Best free disk clone software for Windows 10/8/7

To clone a hard drive easily and safely, you can turn to the best free disk clone software – AOMEI Backupper Standard. It owns many powerful features to help you with disk clone.

• Clone hard drives of different sizes

AOMEI Backupper enables you to clone a smaller drive to a larger drive so as to expand storage space. You are also allowed to clone a larger drive to a smaller one on condition that the smaller drive has enough space to hold all data on the larger drive.

• Clone hard drives of different types

You may want to replace a SATA HDD with a SATA SSD, M.2 SSD, or NVMe SSD. No matter what disk type you choose, AOMEI Backupper ensures a successful clone process. What’s more, you are able to clone a USB flash drive, SD card, memory card and other removable devices.

• Clone hard drives of different brands

AOMEI Backupper supports nearly all common disk brands in the market, such as Samsung, SanDisk, Seagate, Kingston, WD, Crucial, PNY, and so on. There is no problem if you are transferring data between two disks of different brands.

• Other clone features

To make an exact copy of your original hard drive, AOMEI Backupper offers the “Sector By Sector Clone” mode. Besides, you can optimize SSD performance with the “SSD Alignment” feature.

After cloning, you’ll find everything has been transferred from the old hard drive to the new drive, including Windows OS, applications and all your personal data. How cool it is! If you want to have a try, learn a stepwise guide from the next part.

How to clone an HDD to an SSD with Windows 10 installed?

As there is a great demand to upgrade HDD to SSD, I’ll show you how to do it in detail.

► Preparations

1. Connect the target SSD to your computer. If there is an extra drive bay inside your computer, install the SSD there. If not, you can connect the SSD externally via a SATA-to-USB adapter or PCIe-to-USB adapter based on your SSD type.
2. Backup files on the target SSD if it is not empty. Otherwise, you’ll lose your data on the SSD after cloning.

► Steps to clone HDD to SSD

1. Download this disk cloning software for free and install it. Load AOMEI Backupper, click Clone and select Disk Clone.

Tip: The Standard edition only allows you to clone an MBR system disk to another MBR disk.

2. Choose the original hard drive on your computer in the Source Disk page and the SSD you just connected in the Destination Disk page successively.

3. Check the SSD Alignmentoption to improve the read/write speed of the destination SSD. Then, click Start Clone to begin transferring all data from HDD to SSD.

► Boot from the cloned disk

To boot from the cloned SSD, you can either change the boot order in BIOS or remove the old hard drive and install the new SSD there. It should be noted that if you are cloning hard drives of different partition styles (MBR to GPT or GPT to MBR), you should also change boot mode in BIOS to make the cloned SSD bootable. That’s because an MBR disk uses Legacy boot mode while a GPT disk uses UEFI boot mode.

Final words

That’s all about how to clone Windows 10 to a new hard drive without reinstalling OS. Free disk clone software – AOMEI Backupper makes cloning a hard drive an easy thing for everyone, even a computer novice. Try it out by yourself!