How to Replace a Hard Drive in Dell Laptop without Reinstalling?

Want to replace Dell Inspiron laptop hard drive

“I have a Dell Inspiron laptop with 500GB hard disk drive and it is running Windows 10. Now, I want to replace it with an SSD to improve boot, and reading & writing speed. The problem is that I don’t want to reinstall my Windows operating system and all other applications on the newly purchased SSD. So can you tell me how to replace a hard drive in a Dell laptop with SSD without reinstalling?”

Turn to powerful hard drive cloning software

It is rather simple to complete Dell laptop hard drive replacement without reinstallation. You can apply disk cloning software to clone hard drive to SSD in Dell laptop, transferring all data, including operating system, from the current hard drive to destination one.

If SSD comes with cloning software like Samsung Data Migration software, you can use it to move all data on the old hard drive to SSD. When SSD has no cloning software or its built-in cloning software not working, you can turn to a comprehensive and reliable third party cloning software – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It allows you to clone the entire Dell hard drive (Recovery partition is included) to SSD or HDD with different sizes in Windows 7/8.1/8/10, 11, XP, or Vista. For example, cloning 1TB HDD to 500GB SSD. Besides, with a concise and user-friendly interface, it is very easy to handle.

Replace Dell laptop hard drive without reinstallation

Now let’s see how to replace a hard drive in a Dell laptop without Windows and apps reinstallation under AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard.

▶ Preparation works:
▪ Choose a proper SSD or HDD: SSDs or HDDs have different disk sizes, interfaces, and thicknesses. You should pick up an HDD or SSD that is compatible with your Dell laptop. And the capacity of the destination disk should not be smaller than the used space on the current hard drive.
▪ Shut off the Dell laptop and connect the destination disk to it. For connecting the disk, a SATA-to-USB cable or adapter might be necessary.
▪ Download the disk cloning software on your Dell laptop and install it step by step.

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.

After cloning Dell hard drive successfully, you can replace hard drive with cloned SSD or HDD and boot from it.

Notes:

• If there are necessary files on the destination disk, you should better back up these files in advance as this operation will erase all data on it.

Conclusion

It is easy to achieve Dell hard drive replacement without reinstallation through cloning disk to disk via a powerful cloning tool – AOMEI Partition Assistant. In fact, as all-around software, it can help you to solve lots of problems. For example, it allows you to merge non-unallocated space into system drive if the C drive is almost full; it allows you to create Windows bootable media, so that you can boot OS-corrupted computer from the created bootable media.