How to Mirror a Hard Drive in Windows 7?

Scenario

Is there a solution to mirror one hard drive to another? I'm using Windows 7 and I have 2 500GB hard drives. I want to mirror them so that if one of them dies I can immediately boot off the other and continue working as normal without a lengthy restore process.

Why need to mirror hard drive in Windows 7?

As the user in the scenario, he wants to make a backup to prevent Windows 7 PC crash, so mirroring the hard drive might be the best choice to save time and energy doing this job.

There are many benefits of mirroring a hard drive in Windows 7:

▶ Replace an old hard drive
This is maybe the most typical cause of system migration. Running the operating system on a new drive, particularly an SSD, would result in a better user experience.

▶ Increase disk space
When additional files are produced and apps are installed, a low disk space alert may occur. In the worst-case scenario, it may have an impact on the use of the Windows 7 operating system. This problem can simply be solved by transferring Windows 7 to a bigger drive.

▶ Use SSD for OS and HDD for storage
Many customers prefer to put the operating system on an SSD and utilize a hard disk drive for data storage, which is a very effective way of utilizing multiple disk types.

▶ Create a backup
An excellent disaster recovery approach is to duplicate the Windows 7 system in different locations.

So, after the clone, you may move all of the boot files, personal data, and installed applications from the system drive to another disk and boot into the same operating system from it with a better speed or more space.

How to mirror a hard drive in Windows 7 step by step?

To mirror a hard drive, you need to choose a proper tool. It must have easy operation and a clear guide interface for everyone, and the most important thing is that it must be a data-safe tool. Luckily, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is this kind of tool. It’s a disk cloning software for Windows 7/8/8.1/10/11.

The “Disk Clone Wizard” can help you clone HDD/SSD to another HDD/SSD with only mouse clicks. And during the cloning, you can partition your disk, so if you’re going to use a new disk, after the clone, you can directly use it.

◤ Note: If you are cloning MBR to GPT, GPT to MBR, or GPT to GPT disk, please upgrade to the Pro Edition.

Step 1. Launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. You will see the basic environment of your hard drives. To mirror hard drive, here you should 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 if the target drive is SSD. 

Step 5. After returning to the main interface, check the pending operation and click "Apply" and "Proceed" to commit the operation.

After the disk mirroring, you can try to boot your PC from the target disk to check if it’s fine.

To sum up

After reading this guide, hope you know how to make a mirror copy of a hard drive in Windows 7 now. With AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can easily do this by yourself, even if the target disk has a smaller capacity. Besides, if you upgrade to the Pro Edition, you can do more to manage your disk such as App & folder transferring, converting system disk to GPT/MBR without data loss, converting the primary partition to the logical drive, etc.

What’s more, if you need, it also has the Server Edition for Server management.