On this page, we share the best free hard drive cloner for Windows 11, 10, 8, 7. With it, you will be able to clone a hard drive to another HDD or SSD effortlessly in Windows computer.
Hard drive clone software is an application that can perfectly clone every bit of information from one hard drive to another hard drive. It allows you to make a full copy of the source disk, so that you can swap it out for the clone when the source disk fails. Then you don’t need to completely reinstall OS and software, and continue to work more quickly.
Besides, cloning a hard drive is also useful when you look to upgrade your hard, no matter replaces a smaller hard drive with a larger drive or replacing HDD (Mechanical Hard Drive) with SSD (Solid State Drive). Therefore, it's necessary for us to choose a reliable hard drive cloner on Windows 10, 8, 7, as well as Windows 11.
Searching online, you will find lots of different disk cloning software. Among all options, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard can be the best choice for Windows 11, 10, 8, 7 and Windows XP, Vista users. It provides the “Disk Clone Wizard”, allowing you to clone a hard drive without reinstalling via the following two different methods:
◥ Clone Disk Quickly: clone only the used sectors from the source disk to the destination disk, and enable you to clone larger drive to smaller drive as long as the target disk has enough space to hold all used sector from the original disk. ◥ Sector by Sector Clone: clone both used and unused sectors to the destination disk, so the target disk must be equal to, or larger than the source disk. But this method can help clone BitLocker drive and clone a hard drive with bad sectors.
Therefore, you can choose an appropriate method based on your actual requirements and situation. Besides, you can also boot from the destination disk after clone. Now, it’s time to download the free hard drive cloner and learn how to clone a disk.
To clone a hard drive via the recommended free disk cloning software, first connect the second hard drive on Windows 10 PC and ensure it is detected successfully. Secondly, back up important data on the disk since all data will be erased during the disk cloning process.
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.
✎ After cloning the system disk, you have to take the following extra steps to boot Windows from the cloned hard drive:
1. Restart your computer. During the initialization process, long press ESC/delete/F2/F12 or other specific keys to enter the BIOS environment.
2. Access to Boot tab. System devices will appear in order of priority. Move the cloned disk to the top of boot sequence list.
4. Save and exit the BIOS setup utility. Then your computer will restart with the changed settings.
✎ If you are cloning MBR system disk to GPT, or cloning GPT system disk to MBR, you also need to change boot mode between Legacy BIOS and UEFI/EFI at last.
● What is hard drive cloner?
✍ A hard drive cloner is a tool specifically designed to clone hard drives. Hard disk cloning is the process of creating a 1-to-1 copy of the contents of a hard disk drive or solid state drive for backup purposes.
● Is there a free hard drive cloner?
✍ AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is a completely free hard drive cloner on Windows 10, 8, 7, as well as Windows 11. It is dedicated to the easiest way to clone data/system drive without losing data and also provides other great features.
● What is the difference between clone and back up?
✍ Disk cloning is the direct copying of all contents of a disk or partition. In this case, the formatting of the source remains after cloning, and the cloned content can be viewed directly.
✍ A backup is a way of imaging a source. It will generate an image in .afi (file backup) or .adi format (system, partition or disk backup). In this case, you cannot open and inspect the source code directly in Windows File Explorer.
● Is it better to clone than image a hard drive?
✍ A drive image is the creation of an exact mirror image of a hard drive. It stores the operating system, information, data and structure of partitions or the entire hard drive required for booting in the form of a compressed file. The clone copy is the same size as the source drive. In general, cloning is more convenient and more practical than creating an image.
With the best free hard drive cloner on Windows 10, you can easily clone a hard drive easily and safely. Besides that, this freeware can also help you move partition, merge partition, clone partition, check partition for bad sectors, rebuid MBR, and more.
If you are using Windows Server 2022/2019/2016/2012/2008/2003, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server can satisfy you better.