Free Software to Clone a Hard Drive to New Hard Drive Safely

When do you need to clone hard drive to new hard drive?

Let's assume that you've bought a new hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD) that is faster or of much higher capacity than your current system disk, so it’s quite natural you start thinking about transferring your data, operating system and installed applications over to the new hard drive or SSD. To do this, free disk partition software – AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition can help you clone old hard drive to new without reinstalling Windows 10/8/7 and ensure system bootable.

Preparations for hard drive cloning

To clone a hard drive, please do the following:

1. Connect the new hard drive or SSD to your computer. You can install the drive in your computer as a second drive or connect it via SATA-to-USB adapter as an external drive.

2. Turn on the computer, and in Disk Management snap-in initialize disk as the same type as source disk (the hard drive you want to clone).

3. To follow the detailed step-by-step instructions to clone a hard drive, please download and install a full version of this freeware and then start.

How to clone hard drive with free AOMEI Partition Assistant?

In this instruction, I will take Windows 10 for example. I connect a new SSD to my Windows and want to replace the old system disk. Download Freeware.

Step 1. Launch this free HDD clone software. Click "Disk Clone" under the left menu.

Step 2. In the pop-up window, select disk clone method and click "Next" to continue. In our case, we choose "Clone Disk Quickly". Another method "Sector-by-Sector Clone".

Step 3. Disk 1 is selected as the source disk by default. Choose the target disk (a new hard drive or SSD to receive clone contents of the source disk) and click "Next" to continue.

Tips: To change source disk, please go to All Tools > Disk Clone Wizard to select a different method.

Step 4. The next page tells you how to boot operating system from the destination disk. Then, edit partitions on the destination disk if you want to.

Step 5. You can preview the operations you did. To save the changes, you must click "Apply" on the toolbar.

Step 6. After clicking Apply, a window will pop up, listing the "Pending Operations". Confirm the operations you did and click "Proceed" to execute.

When cloning hard drive process is completed, you can also resize/move partition and extend system partition to merge the unallocated space without losing data.