Clone Dell Hard Drive to SSD in Few Clicks [without Reinstallation]

Want to keep all data while replacing hard drive in Dell computer

“I have a dell computer and it comes with a 500GB hard drive that contains Windows 10. Now I want to replace the hard drive with a newly bought SSD but retain all data on the old hard drive. I don’t want to make a fresh install for Windows and all other applications. But how can I transfer all content including OS and to new SSD?”

You can clone hard drive to SSD on Dell computer

If you transfer files from the old hard drive to SSD via copy and paste, you’ll find that it is troublesome and time-consuming. What’s worse, the system won’t boot normally after being pasted. Therefore, it is not a workable way to move all data to SSD via copying and paste.

Don’t worry, you can choose to clone Dell hard drive to SSD. By cloning, you can upgrade Dell hard drive to SSD without reinstalling Windows and all applications. Well, how to copy a hard drive to SSD on a Dell laptop or desktop?

Comprehensive and professional cloning software

Sometimes, your recently purchased SSD is along with data migration software, such as Intel Data Migration software, Samsung Data Migration software, and so on. In such a condition, you can perform disk copy via a built-in cloning tool. If the new SSD has no such tool or the tool is not working, a reliable and powerful third-party hard drive cloning software for Windows 11/10/8/7, XP, and Vista – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is recommended:

How to perform Dell hard drive to SSD copy?

To clone Dell hard drive to SSD with secure boot, in the first place, you should connect the SSD to your Dell computer and make sure that it can be detected by the OS. For a Dell laptop, a USB-to-SATA cable might be necessary. Then, have a look at how it works:

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.

▶ Notes:

A reboot is needed as this operation will be performed under the PreOS environment.

It is also available to clone OS partition only to SSD via AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

All data on the target disk will be erased. If you want to keep the files on the destination one, you can back up it using AOMEI Backupper before cloning.

Follow-up work of cloning

After cloning Dell hard drive to SSD, you can keep your original hard drive as a storage disk and SSD for OS, if the Dell computer is with more than one drive bay. To do so, you need to enter BIOS to set SSD as the priority in the boot order. If you clone GPT to MBR disk or MBR to disk, you need to change boot mode as well. After you boot the system from SSD successfully, you can format the old hard drive to free up space. If the computer owns only one drive bay, locate the old HDD and replace it with cloned SSD.