Windows Transfer Tool: Transfer Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 to New Hard Drive

How to transfer Windows 10 to new hard drive?

“I have a laptop with Windows 10 installed on an SSD. The capacity of SSD is about 200GB and it is almost full. I want to know how to move Windows 10 operating system, kinds of files, apps to a new & larger SSD rather than reinstalling OS and programs on the new SSD from scratch. Any advice will be appreciated!”

Employ a reliable Windows transfer tool

If you transfer OS & apps to new storage drive, like SSD by copy & paste method, you can find that OS and some apps unable to boot normally since the boot files become invalid after pasting to the new location. Therefore, you need a reliable and professional Windows migration tool. Here I would like to introduce AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional (PA Pro) out of those following reasons:

It can completely transfer Windows operating system, apps, files from one disk to another without losing data.

It supports different types of storage devices, including traditional hard disk drive (HDD), solid-state drive (SATA SSD, M.2 SSD, and NVMe SSD), SSHD, USB flash drive, VMware virtual disk, etc.

It supports migrating all data from MBR to GPT, GPT to MBR, MBR to MBR or GPT to GPT.

It is able to move all things on Windows disk to another one of different sizes (larger, equal, smaller) with secure boot.

It enables you to align partition to optimize performance when you migrate all data to SSD.

It allows you to move some apps from one drive to another and makes them workable normally as well.

✔ You can free download the demo version of AOMEI Partition Assistant to have a try!

A detailed guide on migrating Windows to another disk (SSD/HDD)

Now, let’s see how to use the Windows transfer tool to move Windows and all other things from one disk to another.

Preparations:✎...

Connect the destination disk to the Windows computer and make sure it is detected successfully.

Back up everything important on the destination disk since they will be erased during the cloning process.

Check out whether the target disk has enough space to hold all data on the source disk. If not, you will need to delete unnecessary files from the source hard drive beforehand and choose the "Clone Disk Quickly" method in Step 2.

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.

✍ Notes:
► This operation won’t damage the data on the source system disk. You can keep the old system disk as a backup disk in case of some events, like system crash; or erase all data on the old disk to reclaim disk space.
► PA Pro can also complete many other operations related to disk & partition, like copying partition and converting dynamic disk into basic.
► PA Pro is compatible with Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7(64bit and 32bit). If you want to manage partition and disk in Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012 (R2)/2008 (R2/2003, you can use AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.

How to: boot from new hard drive after Windows transfer

After the Windows transfer tool migrates Windows and all other things to the new drive, you may wonder how to boot OS.

If there is only one disk bay on your laptop, replace the old drive with the cloned new disk; And you may need screwdriver to assist you.

If you plan to keep the old hard drive and the new one at the same time, you need to change boot order to boot from the new drive:

▪Reboot your computer and press the functional key to enter BIOS setup while the first screen appears.

▪Choose “Change boot order” and change the new disk to the top of the listed devices.

▪Save and exit the BIOS setup. And your PC will boot from the cloned disk.

Note: If you migrate Windows from MBR to GPT or GPT to MBR, you need to change boot mode from Legacy to UEFI, or UEFI to Legacy.