When you clone your hard drive with different sizes like from a large disk to a smaller one, you may want to adjust the partition size on it after cloning. In this post, you will learn a simple and reliable way to clone hard drive and resize partitions at the same time.
Usually, you are willing to clone your disks from one to another for various reasons like replacing laptop hard drive for an OS upgrade or disk speed improvement. But no matter why you need to copy the hard drive, you must have been bothered by the different sizes of the source disk and destination disk for a long time.
Especially when you clone a small hard drive to a larger one, you will find there is a lot of unallocated space on the disk if you clone partition without resize. Therefore, to make the fullest use of the entire disk space, it's not hard to understand why the majority of users seek to reduce or increase the size of partitions after disk clone like the user case described below:
"I cloned a 500GB SSD to a 1TB SSD. The clone went fine and everything works good, but one little issue is I now have almost 500GB of unallocated space which is not I want. So I dragged the old partitions down to the new drive and expanded the C: drive (OS) to use up all the extra room. But after the clone finished all of the space is now shown under the recovery partition and not C. What would be the best way to correct this? I have really messed with clone hard drive resize partition. Any advice is appreciated!"
Generally speaking, you can resize partition Windows 10 via Windows built-in utilities. For example, you can extend your partitions with the unallocated space after cloning in Disk Management. However, the process of partition resizing is not always smooth and successful, and you are likely to encounter the problem of shrinking/extending volume greyed out.
So have you ever thought about clone hard drive resize partitions at the same time? That is to say, you are allowed to adjust the size of your partitions while copying your hard drive. Interested? I'm not surprised. Because it sounds attractive just like killing two birds with one stone, right? If you want to know more about the specific method, just keep reading.
Obviously, there is no way to cloning drive resize partition at the same time via Windows built-in utilities. To this end, resorting to a third-party tool would be a wise choice. However, not all software on the current market has this function. Luckily, there is the reliable and versatile software named AOEMI Partition Assistant Professional allowing you to adjust partition size during the process of cloning drives. It's one of the most popular disk cloning software for its powerful functions, let's have a closer look.
Get this software to clone hard drive resize partition Windows 10 now:
Step 1. Download and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. 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 another 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.
With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, it's not hard to clone hard drive resize partition at the same time. If you forget to make the size adjustment while cloning your disks, "Resize/Move Partition", "Merge Partitions" or "Allocate free space" will help you make it more easily. If you are using Windows Server, you can try the server edition.