Best Way to Clone Windows 10 to Another Drive

The benefit of cloning Windows to another drive?

Usually, Migrating Windows 10 means migrating it to an SSD or larger HDD. When the migration is completed, users can get the following benefits:

▶ Get a better performance. Compared with HDD, SSD has higher stability, faster read and write speeds, lower working noise, etc. So if you are seeking for high productivity, migrating Windows 10 to an SSD is a good idea.
▶ Get more free space. When the current hard drive space is insufficient, the best response is to migrate Windows to a larger HDD.
▶ Get data security. To prevent data loss due to system disk crashes, you can clone Windows 10 as a backup in advance.

Although you can reinstall Windows 10 directly in the new hard drive, the process is a bit laborious: Creating installation media first, then install Windows system on the new hard drive. So to make it easier, you can use the best cloning software to clone Windows 10 to another drive without reinstalling.

What is the best way to clone Windows 10 without reinstalling?

When you want to move Windows to another hard drive for various reasons, what is the best way to clone Windows 10 without reinstalling? In this case, the humanized AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional came into being. 

Applicable to Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP, its "Migrate OS to SSD" can migrate Windows OS, and easily transfer system-related data to SSD without any errors. If you want to clone the entire hard drive, the "Disk Clone Wizard" feature will provide you with two methods.

As an all-in-one software, it has other surprising features:

★ Before throwing away or selling a hard drive, "Wipe Hard Drive" helps you completely delete the data on the computer, preventing the leakage of personal information.
★ When the C drive is full, "Allocate free space" helps you to safely extend the C drive with free space from another drive.
★ "App Mover" also helps you completely move programs to another drive, and you needn't to worry about the impact on normal usage.

Let's see how to clone a hard drive on Windows 10.

│Need to prepare

Before implementing Windows system migration work, you need to pay attention to the following aspects:

✦ Install a new hard disk: If your computer is a desktop computer, please install the new hard disk into the host computer by yourself; if your computer is a laptop computer, please prepare a SATA to USB adapter to connect the hard drive to it.
✦ New hard drive space: The capacity of the target disk must be larger than the cloned data, otherwise you will fail.
✦ Power problem: The power connection must be stable, otherwise the migration may fail due to power failure.
✦ Initialize the new hard disk: If the new hard drive cannot be found in the computer, please do not forget to initialize this disk.

│How to clone Windows 10 to another drive

After making sure everything is ready, how should we use this best way to clone windows 10? Please refer to the following steps :

Step 1. Download and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, click "Clone" on the top panel and select "Migrate OS".

Step 2. Select disk space on the destination drive and tick "I want to delete all partitions on this disk 2 to migrate system to the disk", then click "Next". (If you want to cancel, you can click "Back".)

Step 3. In the new window, dragging the double arrow to set the size of the system partition.

Step 4. There's a "Note" about how to boot OS after migrating the Windows system.

Step 5. Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to realize the pending operation.

│How to boot your PC from the new drive

After successfully migrating Windows to another hard drive, you need to change the boot drive  to boot Windows from the new hard drive normally.

Step 1. Restart your PC and press F1/F2/F3/F5/Esc repeatedly to get into the BIOS settings.

Step 2. Turn to the Boot Menu and set the new drive as the boot drive.

Additional tip: Clone Windows to another drive

If you want to clone the whole disk including personal data to another hard drive, you can do the following:

Step 1. After preparing all, open AOMEI Partition Assistant. In the main interface, click "Clone" and "Clone Disk" in turn.

Step 2. The two methods "Clone Disk Quickly" and "Sector-by-Sector Clone" are displayed,  click "Clone Disk Quickly". 

Step 3. Choose the target hard drive and click "Next".

Step 4. Select the destination drive and tick "Optimize the performance of SSD".

Step 5. You can click "Next" directly or select the following options to edit disk.

Step 6. Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to clone the whole drive. Then, change the boot order with the method mentioned before.

To sum up

In this article, we discussed the benefits of migrating Windows 10 to another hard drive and the best way to clone Windows 10. If you want to move Windows Server to another hard drive, you can go to the Server Edition.