How to: Clone HDD to HDD in Windows 11, 10, 8, 7

Need to clone HDD to HDD 

“Recently, I’m rather bothered by the 'low disk space warning' always appearing on my existing hard disk drive. To get rid of such an annoying warning, I plan to replace it with a larger one, but I don’t want to reinstall everything on the newly purchased HDD. I have realized that the simplest way is to copy HDD to HDD. Is any advice about disk copy tool and how to handle this tool?”

Find trusted HDD to HDD cloning software

With so much hard drive cloning software, it is not easy to pick up a proper one. Thus, the important criteria are listed as follows for you to refer to:

▪ Reliable: A qualified disk cloning tool should be capable of cloning your original hard disk drive entirely. If some partitions related to the system are not cloned, you won’t be able to boot the computer from the target disk.
▪ Effective: Great disk cloning software can clone hard drive to another one as soon as possible. The long process of cloning will only exhaust your patience.
▪ Flexible: Attractive drive copy software shall be able to satisfy different copying methods like cloning to a smaller drive or clone only one partition on the disk.
▪ Intuitive: A good HDD copy tool cloning software should own an intuitive and simple operating interface. For users, especially non-tech users, the more concise an interface, the easier it is to use.

Based on all the above standards, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is a nice choice. It can clone all partitions, including hidden partitions like recovery partition on one disk to another; it is with fairly simple GUI, enabling non-tech users to operate it straightforwardly; it allows you to clone HDD to HDD or SSD of different sizes. What’s more, it permits you to clone partition and migrate OS to HDD or SSD.

Six steps to copy HDD to HDD

✍ Before drive copy, you should have done these preparations:
● Connect the new HDD to your computer and make sure that it can be detected. If the machine is a laptop and has no second disk bay, a SATA-to-USB cable is required to connect HDD to the laptop.
● It is recommended to clean up your hard drive to shorten cloning time and improve efficiency.
● Enter Disk Management and initialize the new disk as the same type as the disk that you want to clone.

Then, free download this hard drive cloning software and check out the steps about how to clone HDD to another HDD. 

Step 1. Fire up AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. Click “Clone Disk” in the right menu. In the pop-up window, choose one way to clone your HDD. The first one is recommended.

▪ “Clone Disk Quickly”- only the used space on the source disk will be copied to the target disk. This way permits you to clone the hard drive to a smaller one and adjust partition size on the destination disk (The size of the target disk should be not smaller than the size of the used space). Normally, this way shall be your first choice.
▪ “Sector-by-Sector Clone”- all the sectors including deleted or lost files will be cloned to the destination disk. This way might take a longer time than the first way. The capacity of the target disk has to be larger than or equal to the capacity of the source disk.

Step 2. Choose your source disk.

Step 3. Choose your destination disk.

PS.: When cloning HDD to SSD, it is recommended to check Optimized the performance of SSD for better SSD's performance.

Step 4. Make a decision to select one among three copy options: “Clone without resizing partitions”, “Fit partitions to enter disk” and “Edit partitions on the disk”.

Step 5. Here you return to the main interface, confirm the operation and click “Apply”>“Proceed” to implement disk cloning.

Step 6. After cloning, you can remove the old HDD or enter BIOS to change boot priority to boot from cloned disk.

Notes:
✔ Please don’t format or wipe the original HDD before confirming that the operating system can boot from the new HDD.
✔ When cloning HDD to larger HDD and there is unallocated space on the destination hard drive, you can create a partition with the unallocated space or add the unallocated disk space to the partition that you want to extend.
✔ The Standard Edition only supports MBR data disks clone, if you wish to clone MBR system disk, MBR to GPT, GPT to MBR, GPT to GPT, please upgrade to the Professional Edition.

Conclusion

Intend to upgrade HDD to a larger one as the scenario described or want a copy for the original one to protect data? For whatever purpose, cloning hard drive to hard drive will not be a bad choice. And it is obvious that AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard can help you to copy HDD to HDD within five simple steps.

Apart from disk copy, this software can help you to manage disk and partition conveniently. For example, when the C drive is full, you can use it to add non-contiguous unallocated space to it.