Stepwise to Clone Hard Drive to SSD in Windows 7 without Boot Failure

• Why clone Windows 7 hard drive to SSD?
• Best software to clone hard drive to SSD in Windows 7/8/8.1/10/11
• Step-by-step guide: Clone hard drive to SSD in Windows 7/8.1/8/10

Why clone Windows 7 hard drive to SSD?

Compared with HDDs, SSDs come with higher reading and writing speed and are more durable.  To boot PC faster or play games more smoothly, it's wise to use an SSD as your boot drive. Installing Windows 7 on the SSD from scratch can troublesome. In such a condition, many users may take cloning Windows 7 hard disk drive to SSD into consideration. Here is an example:

“My PC comes with a 500GB HDD that holds Windows 7. Now I got an Intel 520 Series SSD of 240GB and want to take it as my boot drive. I wanna clone the system HDD to the SSD drive to migrate all data to the new drive. But can I successfully boot Windows after cloning? If I can, how to perform a Windows 7 bootable clone?"

Best software to clone hard drive to SSD in Windows 7/8/8.1/10/11

Windows 7 has no native tools to clone hard drive to SSD, thus it's necessary to apply third-party cloning software to copy Windows 7 hard disk drive to SSD, and AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is a nice choice. 

♦ It can clone hard drive to SSD or HDD of different sizes (small, larger, or equal), of various brands (Samsung, Seagate, SanDisk, etc.).
♦ It won't miss a file (even a hidden file), ensuring the destination SSD bootable after cloning the system drive.
♦ It has no limitation of partition style whether to clone system or data hard drive to another drive in Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7. 
♦ What's more, it can automatically make a 4K alignment of SSD while cloning. 

Step-by-step guide: clone hard drive to SSD in Windows 7/8.1/8/10/11

Now, connect your SSD to the Windows 7 computer and ensure that it can be detected; sort out the old hard drive, delete unnecessary files and transfer important files to another safe place if its used space is larger than SSD’s whole capacity; back up the SSD if there are important files on it. Then, download, install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional and check out the following steps (supposed that you are going to clone Windows 7 hard drive to SSD).

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source 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 SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive.

Step 5. At last, click "Apply" and "Proceed" in the main interface to start cloning the hard drive.

★Tips:

If you don’t want to clone the entire hard drive, you can clone OS-related partitions only (data partitions not included) via its Migrate OS to SSD function.

This process needs to be performed under PreOS mode, as it involves the system.

This process can also be applied to clone hard drive to SSD in Windows 10/8.1/8/7. If you are a Windows Server user, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.

After finishing the hard drive to SSD cloning process, to boot PC from the SSD successfully, you need to enter BIOS to set the cloned SSD as the boot device, if you keep your old hard drive and SSD simultaneously.