How to Clone Hard Drive to New Hard Drive in Windows 8 without Reinstalling System and Applications?

Posted by @AOMEI

July 29, 2019

Learn the method to clone hard drive Windows 8 with free software without operation of reinstalling system or applications easily and safely.

AOMEI Partition Assistant

AOMEI Partition Assistant Complete yet easy to use hard disk partition manager software to resize, move, merge, copy partitions, migrate OS, convert MBR/GPT disk without data loss.
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Key Features

  • Resize Partition

    Extend system partition by shrinking another one without losing data.

  • OS Migration

    Transfer OS to SSD without reinstalling Windows and applications.

  • Convert MBR to GPT

    Convert disk style from MBR to GPT for UEFI/EFI boot and 2TB+ disk.

  • Convert Dynamic Disk

    Convert dynamic disk to basic disk without deleting volumes.

  • Disk Copy

    Clone a hard drive to another or SSD for upgrading and replacing hard disk.

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Free Partition Manager
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PE Builder
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NTFS to FAT32 Converter

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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 Standard 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.

Free software to 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. Some of the software is not free of charge, but free software-AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard 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 Standard 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 1 (source disk) to Disk 2 (destination disk).

Step1: Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. And then, click "Disk Copy Wizard" in the left panel.

Step2: Choose Copy Disk Quickly and then click Next.

Step3: Choose the source disk (Disk 1) and then click Next.

Step4: Select Disk 2 as destination disk, and then click Next.

Step5: Make sure you have set the entire things right, click Yes.

Step6: Click "Apply".

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

Apart from the function of clone disk, AOMEI Partition has many other functions, so download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition and check it out.

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