How to Clone Hard Drive to another in Windows 8 without Reinstalling?

If you prepare to upgrade your Windows 8 hard drive, you firmly would clone the previous drives completely at first. What's worth mentioning here is the files in the system partition can not merely be dragged to a new partition, because by doing like that, perhaps you can not start your computer normally. Therefore, capable third party clone software plays a significant part here.

As a magic partition tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is strongly recommended to aid you clone hard drive the system partition as well as other partitions. Moreover, it has other powerful features, such as, Resize Partition, Merge Partitions, Split Partition, and more useful features.

Clone hard drive without reinstalling Windows 8 or 8.1

With the increase of the user need in cloning the partition and cloning a previous hard drive to a new one, nearly all of the partition software has the clone feature now. AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional can help you resolve the clone partition task securely and freely.

Moreover, it has two options for you to reach the goal, "Copy Disk Quickly" and "Sector-by-sector Copy". You can choose either of them based on your need. In addition, it works with both 32 bit and 64 bit version of Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 7/Vista.

AOMEI Partition Assistant helps clone hard drive for Windows 8

As what has been mentioned above, different clone method has different requirement on the unallocated space. AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard offers you with two ways to clone disk in Windows 10, you can choose the suitable one depending on the size of unallocated space on your destination disk.

• Copy Disk Quickly: The size of the unallocated space must be equal or larger than the size of the used part in the source drive.

• Sector-by-sector Copy: The size of the unallocated space must be equal or larger than the size of the source drive.

Notes: when you clone the disk that has the system partition, the operation will be completed automatically by the computer under the PreOS mode (restarting mode).

Next, it is an example of cloning Disk 0 (source disk) to Disk 1 (destination disk).

Step1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. And then, 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.

Tips:

• AOMEI Backupperwhich enables you to backup system/files/partition is alsois also fully compatible with Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7/Vista and the steps of cloning hard drive in Windows 8.1 are the same as those to clone Windows 8 hard drive.

• As you can see in the picture, the size of Disk 2 is larger than Disk 1, if the size of Disk 2 is smaller than Disk 1. Therefore, only if the size of the used part in Disk 1 is equal or smaller than the size of Disk 2 you can complete the task of clone hard disk