Nowadays, cloning a hard drive with the best free disk cloning software is the fastest and easiest way to boost an old computer. And you don’t need to wasting time re-installing Windows and programs from scratch. The greatest advantage is the cloning process will keep all your data on this disk intact, so you can restore these files effortlessly. In addition, you still can use it as a data backup to prevent disaster. Well then, what is the best free cloning software to clone a hard drive to another one, either HDD or SSD? Please keep reading below to get it and learn how to upgrade the hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.
What Is the Best Free Disk Cloning Software for Windows?
Although there are many free disk cloning software online, you cannot find fully functional disk cloning software. For example, some users report that the disk cloning process seems to be successful, but they cannot use it to start Windows normal
To perform this process smoothly, you need the best free disk cloning software that should meet the following requirements.
- Have an intuitive interface, so all the users even novices can easily and quickly understand it.
- Support cloning hard drives with different size. You can clone a hard drive to a larger drive and clone a hard drive to a smaller SSD.
– Support cloning both MBR and GPT disk. - Ensure secure boot after cloning the hard disk.
- Support all branded HDDs and SSDs, whether SATA, NVMe, or PCIe, such as Samsung, WD, SanDisk, HP, etc.
- Support 4k align technology. You can use it to accelerate the writing and reading speed of the SSD disk, so as to make it reach the best status.
- Support cloning all sectors of a hard drive to another one.
In view of these requirements, I strongly recommend you free disk clone software – AOMEI Backupper Standard. For more details, you can download it to explore yourself. Also, you could use other software, which can satisfy your needs.
Step by Step Guide – Clone Hard Drive to Another Drive in Windows 10
To ensure the clone hard drive can boot successfully, you need to make some preparations in advance.
- Get a new hard drive, it can be HDD or SSD. If it’s not initialized, please initialize the disk in the disk management.
- Check both disk capacity and ensure the new HDD or SSD is larger than or equal to the original one. If not, the cloning process may fail because of insufficient disk space.
- Clean the old disk if the new HDD or SSD is smaller. You can delete useless files, uninstall programs you no longer use, transfer large files to a different location and delete it from the old disk, and more.
- Check disk partition style and be sure both disks use the same partition style, MBR disk to MBR disk, for example.
Well then, let’s get started to clone the hard drive in Windows 10/8/7 with a few steps. The process is exactly the same and fixed, so you don’t need to worry about human error. Please connect the new disk ahead of time and make sure it’s detected.
Step 1. Install AOMEI Backupper Standard on your computer and then launch it, you will see its main page and 6 different tabs, namely “Home”, “Backup”, “Sync”, “Restore”, “Clone”, “Tools”.
To clone a hard disk, click “Clone” > “Disk Clone” subsequently.
Step 2. Here you will see all the connected disks, select the old disk you want to clone as source disk (here is Disk0), and click “Next”.
Step 3. Then, select the new HDD or SSD as destination disk and click “Next”. After that, you will be asked to backup important data in advance, because the existing partitions on the destination disk will be overwritten or deleted.
Step 4. Click “SSD Alignment” to boost the performance of your SSD disk if the target disk is. And then, confirm all the partitions required to start Windows are included and click “Start Clone” to perform a hard disk clone.
Over to You: That’s all for the best free disk cloning software, you could use AOMEI Backupper Standard to clone a hard drive. With it, you just need to follow the given tutorial and click the corresponding button. After the cloning process finishes, restart your computer and it will try to start from the cloned hard drive. If not, please set the cloned hard drive as the first boot option and try again. Practice is the only criterion for testing truth, so you just need to try this software and then know it’s a great choice for a hard disk clone. Let’s get started.
