HELP: OS Installed on the Wrong Hard Drive

My OS installed on the wrong hard drive

"Hello, I just purchased an M5520 laptop with 256G SSD and a 2TB spinning HDD. The system came with OS installed on spinning media which defeats why I'd added the SSD (i.e. OS startup speed). Can you tell me how to either move\clone to a new drive or re-install to SSD?"

This situation often happens when you’re trying to install OS while more than one hard drive is connected to your computer. You can reinstall the OS on the hard drive, normally on the SSD (for the fast speed), on which you intend to place the system, however, it’s not easy for everyone. Thus, how to move OS to another hard drive without data loss on the old disk?

Fix: Windows 10 installed on the wrong hard drive

Of course, you can only migrate OS from one hard drive to another one avoiding reinstalling, and the system can boot successfully. With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a convenient and powerful disk manager for Windows 11/10/8/7/XP and Server users, its “Migrate OS to SSD” feature not only clones the OS but also clones all the contents of the relevant partition. And the hot clone way allows you to keep running your OS during the migration process.

▶ Tips:  You’d better backup the SSD before moving OS because all data will be deleted after OS transfer.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. Click “Clone"> "Migrate OS" in the top menu.

Step 2. In the pop window, select the SSD as the destination place to store the system files.

Step 3. Resize system partition on the SSD.

Step 4. There’s a note on how to boot from the SSD after migration. After reading it, click "Finish".

Step 5. Click ‘’Apply“to execute all operations.

Then the moving is over, your destination disk now is your system disk.

Further reading about Windows 10 installed on the wrong drive

If the wrong hard drive has some files and data that you also want to move to another disk, or it’s just an old disk you want to transfer all the files and then abandon them to the trash can. AOMEI Partition Assistant can also clone the whole disk. The second hard drive is the exact duplicate disk of the source disk, which means you can also avoid reinstalling OS and other installed programs.

▶ Tip: Back up necessary data if there are files on the SSD, as this operation will erase all data on the destination disk.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, and then click "Clone" and "Clone Disk".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, choose “Clone Disk Quickly”. If you need to clone a hard drive with bad sectors and the capacity of the target SSD is not smaller than the source disk, please choose “Sector-by-Sector Clone”.

Step 3. Locate the system disk and choose it as the source disk.

Step 4. Choose the SSD as the destination disk, and tick the box before “Optimize the performance of SSD…” to make SSD partition alignment.

▶ Note: If there are data saved on SSD, you'll be prompted to delete all partitions and wipe all data on SSD.

Step 5. In this window, adjust the partition size on the destination SSD. If you clone HDD to a smaller SSD, the option of “Clone without resizing partitions” 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. In the main interface, to perform the cloning operation, click “Proceed” and “Apply”.

Then, you can try to reboot from SSD to check, the check method is the same as we mentioned in “Migrate OS”.

Now you don’t need to worry about the installed Windows on the wrong drive. Besides the “Migrate OS” and “Clone Disk” feature, AOMEI Partition Assistant can also clone a single partition or resize, or delete it, and this versatile software can also help you improve the performance of your HDD or release more free space on SSD.