As computer users, we often face the need to upgrade hard drive to another one or replace the existing one due to various reasons such as failure or damage, insufficient space, or low performance. In such cases, cloning the Windows hard drive becomes necessary to transfer all the data and settings to the new hard drive. This article demonstrates how to clone hard drive on Windows and includes multiple reasons that induce the demand to clone Windows hard drive.
Why Clone Windows Hard Drive?
The main reasons why need to clone a hard drive on Windows are listed below:
✦ For backup purpose. Cloning a hard drive is a great way to make a copy of all your important data, including the operating system, applications, and personal files. If anything happens to your original hard drive, you can simply replace it with the cloned one and get back to normal use without losing any data.
✦ For larger capacity and better performance. If you want to upgrade your hard drive to a larger capacity HDD or a faster SSD, cloning is a much faster and easier way to transfer all your data and settings than reinstalling everything from scratch.
How to Clone a Hard Drive on Windows?
While Windows includes a ton of handy tools such as Windows 10 backup, disk cloning tool is not one of them. Fortunately, a third-party professional cloning software can do this task effectively, that is AOMEI Backupper Professional.
As the best disk clone software for Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP, it has numerous powerful features to help you migrate data from one hard drive to another, including:
♦ It offers you 3 clone types as System/Disk/Partition clone. The Disk Clone feature allows you to clone hard drive to another one or SSD with ease.
♦ It supports various disk types, including all-branded (Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, etc.) HDDs, SATA/M.2 SSDs, PCIe NVMe SSDs, USB drives, and SD cards, etc. and various partition styles such as direct MBR to MBR/MBR to GPT or GPT to GPT/MBR.
♦ If the target drive is an SSD, it supports 4K partition alignment for SSD to improve the reading and writing speed.
What are the detailed steps to finish the task of migrating all data from one hard drive to another one? Continue reading and you will master the specific process.
See also | Best Free Cloud Backup Software for Windows in 2023
Steps to migrate hard drive data with AOMEI Backupper
Before you follow the graphical steps, you need to do the listed preparations:
1. If there is important data on the source hard drive, make sure to backup critical data beforehand for the cloning process will overwrite all data on it.
2. Click the button below to get the hard disk cloning software downloaded and installed on your PC. And follow the steps to clone hard drive.
Step 1. Launch AOMEI Backupper. Click Clone from the left panel and then click Disk Clone. To clone Windows 10 to new hard drive only, please choose System Clone.
Step 2. Select the current hard drive you want to copy as the source disk and click “Next”.
Step 3. Select the new hard drive or SSD you have connected to your PC as destination and click “Next”.
Step 4. If your target hard drive is an SSD, please tick “SSD Alignment” to improve its reading and writing performance. Confirm the clone settings and click “Start Clone” to complete the process.
After the cloning Windows hard drive process is successfully completed, restart your computer. Then you can enter BIOS to change the boot order, or replace the current drive with the target one and boot from it directly.
Also checkout | How to Change Network Settings on a Windows 10 VPS and Protect Your Server
Conclusion
Now you know how to clone Windows hard drive to another one with the best disk cloning software AOMEI Backupper. It ensures that all the data and settings are transferred to the new hard drive with many flexible clone features, making it an exact replica of the old one.
In addition to clone feature, it comes with other excellent features such as sync to help you solve slow file transfer on Windows 11. There are other outstanding features waiting for you to explore, why not try it now?
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