Need to ghost hard drive to SSD, but don’t know how to do it? This post will show you how to ghost clone hard drive to SSD in Windows 10, 8, 7.
“Recently, I bought a Dell computer with a 750GB hard drive, Windows 10 Pro. I want to transfer it to a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB. Can I just ghost hard drive to the new SSD without reinstalling OS and other programs? Any one can tell how to do it step by step? Thanks!”
Generally speaking, to ghost hard drive to SSD means to migrate all data from one hard drive to another one. And after this cloning operation, the SSD contains the exact data as the old hard drive. It can be a great solution for disk upgrade, replacement and backup.
For instance, if the hard drive is used for a long time, its available space will be smaller and the computer will run slower, then you can ghost the hard disk to SSD and replace the old one. If your system boots and runs slowly on the HDD, you can also upgrade it to an SSD drive by ghosting it. Besides, the hard drive failure always happens, in order to avoid data loss during the accident, you can clone the HDD to another drive for a complete backup.
To ghost copy hard drive to SSD smoothly, you can turn to a third-party hard drive ghosting tool like AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. It is a powerful disk partition manager and compatible with all editions of Windows 10/8/7 and Windows XP/Vista (either 32-bit and 64-bit). It has the “Disk Clone Wizard”, which allows you to ghost your hard drive to SSD very conveniently in Windows PC. Besides, it is possible to clone a larger disk to smaller disk by the “Clone Disk Quickly” method as long as the destination disk space is bigger than the used space of the source disk.
Now, you can download the Demo version and take a closer look at the steps of ghosting the hard drive to SSD in Windows 10. Before proceeding, you should connect the SSD to your computer, make sure it is detected, and back up important files on it because all will be deleted in the operation.
Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. In the top toolbar, click “Clone” > “Clone Disk”.
Step 2. In the pop-up window, choose a copy method. Here we choose “Clone Disk Quickly”, then click “Next” to continue.
▸Clone Disk Quickly: Only the used space of the hard drive will be cloned to another one; it is possible to adjust partition size during the copy process. ▸Sector-by-Sector Clone: All sectors of the hard drive will be copied to another one.
Step 3. In the next window, select the destination disk (here is your SSD), tick “Optimize the performance of SSD” box, and click “Next”. If the SSD has partitions, a data loss warning message will pop out.
Step 4. After that, you can adjust the partition size on the destination disk as you need. And click “Next” to continue.
▸“Clone without resizing partition”: keep the size of source partitions. ▸ “Fit partitions to entire disk”: the program automatically adjusts the size of partition to fit the entire disk. ▸“Edit partitions on this disk”: resize partition on the disk as you like.
Step 5. Then, a boot note will appear and you can read it. Click "Finish".
Step 6. It will go back to the main interface. Preview the changes and click “Apply” to complete this operation.
If you are cloning the system disk, you should note the partition style of the source and target disk. Cloning MBR system disk to GPT disk, you have to change Legacy boot mode to UEFI/EFI in order to boot PC from the cloned disk. The vice versa is also true.
With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Pro, you can ghost hard drive to SSD easily and effectively in Windows 10/8/7. Besides disk clone, it also provides you many other powerful functions like resize/delete/create/split/merge/move partition, clone partition, rebuild MBR, wipe hard drive, SSD secure erase and so on. And you can also migrate OS to new hard drive with this tool, too. If you want to apply AOMEI Partition Assistant on Server, you can try the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server edition.