How to Replace Hard Drive for MSI Computer Without Reinstalling?

Why replace MSI hard drive?

MSI (Micro-Star International) is a famous and excellent supplier for computer, gaming laptops, hardware, and other related items.

Usually, MSI will pre-install a 1TB HDD or small SSD on each of their laptops like GT70 GT72, which is too smaller for a gaming hard drive. After a period of time, many people would like to upgrade their MSI hard drive. And replace the old MSI hard drive with an SSD, which provides much faster running speed, can be the best solution.

Next, we will show you how to do MSI hard drive replacement that adding a newer or larger SSD and cloning the MSI hard drive to the SSD.

How to replace hard drive for MSI laptops without reinstalling games and OS?

Now, follow the next content, and learn how to replace hard drive for MSI laptops without reinstalling system and applications.

Preparations:

• A new hard disk or SSD that is compatible with your MSI laptop and system (you can refer to this link to learn how to choose an SSD)

• An MSI computer with Windows operation system installed.

• Install a good disk clone tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It is Whether your disk is MBR or GPT partition table, this tool enables you to clone data and system from the old disk to another SSD or HDD successfully

Steps to replace MSI hard drive

AOMEI Partition Assistant allows you to clone a larger disk to smaller SSD/HDD given the SSD is expensive, so your new disk may be smaller than the MSI hard drive. Besides, it provides “Partition Alignment” feature to further improve the MSI computer performance.

Step 1. Unscrew your MSI computer, and plug the new SSD into it. If there isn't enough space for new hard disk, you can use a hard disk box to connect it.

Step 2. Open the installed AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, click "Clone" in the main interface, and select "Clone Disk".

Step 3. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk like SSD and click "Next".

Step 4. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 5. 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 Optimize the performance of SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive. 

Tip: If you want to clone Windows to a smaller drive, the "Clone without resizing partitions"  button will be greyed out. Then, a Note about how to boot OS from the destination disk will pop up. Read and keep it in mind.

Step 6. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

✍Note: If your computer can only insert one hard drive, you can back up the old MSI hard drive to a USB stick or external hard drive firstly via backup software, then remove the original MSI hard drive, and put the new SSD on where the MSI hard drive used to be. Then restore the MSI image to the SSD drive.
More details can be found in "Upgrade Hard Drive to SSD for MSI Gaming Laptops".

How to boot from the new MSI hard drive?

After replacing old MSI hard drive to new SSD, restart your computer and set the new MSI hard drive as the boot drive.

Step 1. Press and hold “F2” to “Enter Setup” when you see the first screen.

Step 2. And choose “Change boot order” then set the new MSI hard drive as the boot drive.

Step 3. Press “F10” to save the operation.

If the partition table of the SSD differs from that of MSI hard drive, you need to change your boot mode. For example, if you replace the MBR system disk with an SSD that supports GPT, you need to change BIOS to UEFI.

Conclusion

This is how to perform MSI hard drive replacement, I really hope this article can help you. And the same method applies to different MSI computers like GT70, GT72, GT75, and other computers hard drive replacement.

Moreover, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional provides other great functions; you can just migrate OS to SSD, erase SSD securely, and partition recovery, etc. And if your system is Windows Server, you can upgrade MSI computer or laptop hard drive with AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition.