Can I Clone System Drive Without Restart?

Scenario: Can you clone OS while it is running?

“I intend to replace the 120 GB SSD with a larger one and utilize the 120GB disk as a backup. Since I only want to leave my system, I only need to clone my system drive. I searched for some tools, but some require a three times reboot of my pc! Is there any tool that doesn't need to restart?”

In this case, the user wishes to clone the system drive without restarting the computer. Although rebooting the PC won’t take much time but it will halt running programs to complete the task. If you’re using a Windows Server or running a virtual machine, rebooting the current system will be quite annoying.

What do you know about cloning system drive?

Most OS migration software will ask users to restart their devices at the end of all steps. Because they are employing the cold clone method to transfer data to another computer node, the computer is offline during the cloning procedure.

Compared with the cold clone, hot clone, or live migration can execute this cloning process in a running computer, whether it's a real or virtual machine. Users can clone the system and disk without interrupting any ongoing applications.

How to clone system drive without restart in Windows?

So, which cloning method you choose depends on what OS migration tool you choose. If you wish to do a hot clone, you should opt for cloning software using the hot clone method.

If you haven’t had a clear choice, we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a Windows disk/partition manager that can run smoothly on a physical and virtual machine. Its “Migrate OS to SSD” feature employs the hot clone way to help users realize clone system drive without restart. And the operation is simple for all users, only a few clicks can finish this job.

Step 1. Connect the target disk to your computer and ensure it can be detected; install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. Click “Clone” on in the top toolbar, and choose “Migrate OS”.

Step 2. Choose an unallocated space on the target disk as the location. If there is no unallocated space, you can check “I want to delete all partitions on disk 2 to migrate system to the disk” and then click "Next".

Step 3. In this window, you can resize partition and modify other information (including location, and drive letter) of the partition on the new disk, of course, you can also keep default settings.

Step 4. A note about how to boot OS from the target disk will show up, keep it in mind and click "Finish" to continue.

Step 5. You’ll back to the main interface where you can preview the result of the operation. To commit it, click “Apply” and “Proceed”.

Then the target disk will possess your OS.

Further tips: Clone system disk to another disk

With this tool, cloning system drive without restart Windows is simple work. However, if you want to copy the whole disk, AOMEI Partition Assistant can also help you. The “Disk Clone Wizard” feature allows users to clone disks in two ways. You can clone only used space by a quick clone or create a complete duplicate disk by sector-by-sector clone.

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant. Click “Clone Disk” in the right menu.

Step 2. Select a copying method as you need from "Clone Disk Quickly" and "Sector-by-Sector Clone". Here we select “Clone Disk Quickly” as an example.

Step 3. Select the Windows system disk as the source disk and hit on “Next”.

Step 4. Then select the SSD drive as the destination disk and click “Next”.

Step 5. Now, you can also resize partition just being created on an SSD drive.

Step 6. Read the subsequent boot note, click “Finish” and then click “Apply” to execute the pending operation.

Then you can boot into BIOS to change the boot disk.

To sum up

So, this is the guide on how to clone system drive without restart the computer. Cold clone and hot clone are both nice methods, you just need to choose a suitable one according to your situation.

No matter which you need, AOMEI Partition Assistant can be your best choice to clone your disk or system drive. What’s more, it also has many other practical features such as converting to GPT/MBR without data cleaning, moving installed programs and folders, extending partitions, etc.