AOMEI Partition Assistant
Complete Guide: Change Windows 10 System Disk Without Reinstalling OS
Sometimes, you might want to change Windows 10 system disk to SSD for better performance, or change system disk from MBR to GPT. Either situation, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can help you get it done without any efforts.
By Emily / Updated on August 1, 2024
Scenario
“Recently I bought a computer where genuine windows 10 is already installed. But unfortunately, it just has a SATA 500GB HDD and it is rather slower sometimes. So now I want to change the Windows 10 system disk to an SSD drive. But the question is my genuine windows... Will I be able to transfer this genuine Windows 10 from my old HDD to a new SSD? And also I was not given any windows installation disk when I bought my laptop...plz help me...”-from answers.microsoft.com
Why change Windows 10 system disk to another disk?
From the scenarios above, it shows the user wants to move his Win10 operating system from HDD to SSD and change the system hard drive to the solid-state drive because the HDD tends to be slower in performance while the SSD can improve the booting time and overall performance of the system. That’s might be most users’ reason to change system disk. Additionally, some users look to upgrade Windows 10 system disk to a larger HDD to get large disk space for installing more apps.
Guide: change Windows system disk to SSD without reinstallation
To change the Windows system disk, most users, especially the rookies, will choose to reinstall the OS and other programs onto the new disk, then wipe data on the old system disk. It could be an solution, but the Windows installation media is required. What if you don’t have one, or don’t want to reinstall the system or programs, especially when the OS or program activation codes are not available any longer?
In this case, you can turn to the “disk clone” solution, which can move everything from to another disk and make an 1:1 duplicate of the the original system disk. For this task, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is worth a try. It can clone MBR system disk to GPT, GPT system disk to MBR, GPT to GPT or MBR to MBR. Moreover, the destination disk will be bootable as well and everything will work as they did in the source system disk. Next, we will show how to change the Windows 10 system disk to another disk with the “Disk Clone Wizard”. You can download the demo version for a free trial.
Before you do:
①All data on the destination disk will be erased, so make a backup in advance if necessary. Besides, make sure the disk is large enough to contain the used sectors of the source disk.
②If the destination disk partition style is different from the source Windows system disk, for example, the destination disk is GPT while the source one is MBR, you have to ensure the Windows 10 is or has upgraded to 64-bit, and your motherboard supports UEFI or EFI boot mode. Because only 64-bit Windows can boot from GPT disk and you will need to change Legacy to UEFI after cloning.
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 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 6. You can preview the disk cloning operation by viewing the "Pending Operations". To commit the "Pending Operations", please click "Apply" and "Proceed".
After it is done, you have to reboot your computer. The above operation is cloning Windows 10 system disk from MBR to GPT, so you have to change Legacy to UEFI boot mode in BIOS. Besides, you can change the boot order to set the cloned disk as the first boot device in BIOS to boot from the destination disk. Or, you can directly remove the old Windows 10 system disk and install the new disk to boot from it.
Note: if you just want to transfer only OS to another disk, you can use the “Migrate OS to SSD Wizard”.
Extra info: change Windows system disk from MBR to GPT
Above is how to change Windows 10 system disk to another hard drive (SSD or HDD) by disk clone method. Besides, a good number of users are eager to convert the Windows 10 system disk from MBR partition style to GPT partition style. GPT is relatively superior to MBR. The GPT supports 2TB+ hard drive and unlimited primary partitions (theoretically), and it adopts the UEFI boot mode, much faster and more advanced than Legacy BIOS boot mode of MBR disk.
If you are one of them and looking for a way to change the system disk to GPT style, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can also help you. This software is able to finish the MBR to GPT or GPT to MBR conversion without damaging the inside data, including operating system, programs or other personal files.
Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Right-click the MBR boot disk and select "Convert to GPT".
Step 2. Click on "Yes" to confirm the operation.
Step 3. Back to the main interface, click "Apply" and "Proceed" to execute the pending operation.
Summary
Now, you must have learned the necessary knowledge to change Windows 10 system disk to SSD/HDD, or from MBR to GPT/GPT to MBR disk without reinstalling OS. Under the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, disk partition management can be as easy as A, B, C. Additionally, it can clone a partition, merge partitions, split partition, convert dynamic disk to basic one without removing volumes, allocate free space from one partition to another and more. To change Windows Server system disk, you can switch to AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.
