Can You Clone an HDD While It Is Running?

Can I clone a hard drive while Windows is running?

Cloning disk is a nice choice for backup or upgrading disks. Mostly, users will need to reboot several times during the whole process. If you’re running some programs or your virtual machine, which is testing or checking some programs, is running, restarting your device will interrupt your work.

So, is it possible to clone the drive while Windows is running?

The answer depends on what cloning software you select.

Normally, cloning tools are using cold cloning, also known as cold migration to transfer data from one drive to another. Thus, if you want to clone a hard drive or drive on a Windows PC or a virtual machine running Windows, you’ll need to find a cloning tool that employs the hot clone method which allows users to clone disks and drives while Windows is running.

How can you clone HDD while it is running?

Honestly, it’s unnecessary to restart your computer over and over again. Just cloning a disk, it’s not a big issue. Here, we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a disk and partition tool for all Windows PC users.

It supports Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP, to clone a hard drive or SSD, the “Disk Clone Wizard” feature can help you. With some clicks, you can clone your disks while Windows running. And if you just want to migrate OS and leave other data on the source drive, you can choose the “Migrate OS to SSD” feature which also doesn’t require rebooting the PC.

Now, let’s see the details.

Step 1. Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant. Then, in the top toolbar, click "Clone" and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the old hard disk as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the new drive as the destination disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to "Sector to Sector clone", and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of the SSD. 

Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

Step 6. When this is done, you can continue to use Windows. And when the clone is over, Windows will not reboot.

If you clone a system disk, next time, you’ll need to boot into BIOS to change the boot drive from the old disk to the cloned disk.

Summary

Can you clone an HDD while it is running? Yes, with AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can clone your disk or OS when you’re using the PC. Besides, this tool also has other functions like converting partition type between MBR and GPT without data damage, transferring installed apps, disk speed tests, and so on. What’s more, if you need to efficiently manage your Windows Server, you can choose the Server Edition.