Stepwise: How to Clone My C Drive to SSD

Can I clone my C drive to SSD without boot failure?

“I'm preparing to upgrade my computer from an HDD to an SSD, so I'm looking for a safe clone tool. Are there any tools out there to clone C drive to a new SSD? I don’t want to reinstall my OS. The computer in question has Windows 10 Home.”

Why do we clone C drive to SSD?

SSD is more and more prevail because of its faster read and write speed, larger storage capacity, and lower hard drive power consumption. For a better computer experience, many users would like to set an SSD as the boot disk. Therefore, moving the current OS and transfer installed programs to SSD to avoid reinstalling becomes a nice choice for PC tech fanciers.

Besides this, if your PC boots slowly, the PC freezes during gaming, C drive has insufficient space, you can try to clone the C drive to a larger SSD for faster speed on the computer.

What do we need to prepare?

Before we start to see details about how to clone boot partition to SSD, you have something to prepare:

1. SSD: The SSD you prepared may have a small capacity than your HDD. It’s ok. As long as it’s larger than the used space of C drive is enough.
2. Windows computer.
3. Professional clone software: The reason you might need to select a reliable tool is to ensure the transferred OS can successfully boot as before and the steps should be easy. And don’t forget partition alignment after cloning, otherwise, your SSD might boot slow.

How to my clone C drive to the new SSD?

For the above and other reasons we haven’t mentioned here, we recommend you powerful clone software—AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. What we need is a professional clone tool that combines safely clone disk and partition with simple operations and maintenance after successful cloning. It even supports cloning MBR disk to GPT disk.

AOMEI Partition Assistant offers you 2 methods to clone C drive to SSD:

1. Migrate OS to SSD: This function only clones the OS and all system-relevant files to make sure success.
2. Disk Clone Wizard: This feature can create a complete duplicate of the current disk. The OS and all installed programs will be closed. Thus, you don’t need to rebuild all data.

▌Method 1. Clone the whole hard drive that holds the C drive

If you wish to upgrade your old disk to an SSD or other larger disk and keep all programs and your OS, you may need to clone the entire disk to migrate all on your disk.

Note: Here we use a smaller SSD as the example.

Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, click “Clone” in the top menu, then choose “Clone Disk".

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

Step 3. Select the SSD 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.

▌Method 2. Migrate OS to SSD

If you only wish to move the current OS partition to your new disk and leave the programs on the non-OS partition, this function can help you quickly install your current OS on your new disk.

Step 1. Click "Clone"> “Migrate OS” and read the information.

Step 2. Choose an unallocated space on your target SSD.

Step 3. You can adjust the partition on the destination disk. Then, keep the Note in mind.

Step 4. Click Apply and Proceed to commit operation.

How to boot from cloned SSD after cloning and migration

After you clone the C drive to SSD with secure boot, you need to enter BIOS to set the SSD as the first boot device if you keep your SSD and HDD simultaneously. 

Here is the whole process:

Step 1. Reboot your PC and constantly press F2, Del, F8, or F12 to access the BIOS menu.

Step 2. You can use the arrow key to choose the Boot tab.

Step 3. Then move the cloned SSD to the first position in the list.

Step 4. Save the changes and exit the BIOS setup utility. Then your PC will restart from the SSD.

Check more details on how to boot details information.

Conclusion

Can I clone my C drive to SSD? Now you’ve got a clear answer. As an excellent disk and partition manager for Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista and Windows Server users, AOMEI Partition Assistant proffers all Windows users an all-around service. If you’re considering how to resize/extend/merge/ partitions, how to clone partition to SSD, or how to wipe hard drive and defrag disk to improve the performance of the computer, AOMEI Partition Assistant will give you the best help.