Free Software to Copy & Clone a Hard Drive to New Hard Drive Safely

When do you need to clone hard drive to new hard drive?

Let's assume that you've bought a new hard disk that is faster and of much higher capacity than your current system disk, so it’s quite natural you start thinking about transferring your data, operating system and installed applications over to the new hard drive. To do this, free disk partition software – Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition can help you clone old hard drive to new without losing data and ensure system bootable.

Preparation for hard drive clone

To clone a hard drive, please do the following:

1. Connect the new hard drive to your computer.
2. Turn on the computer, and in Disk Management snap-in initialize disk as the same type as source disk (the hard drive you want to clone).
3. To follow the detailed step-by-step instructions to clone a hard drive, please download and install a full version of this freeware and then start. Free Download from Download.com

How to clone hard drive with free Aomei partition software?

In this instruction, I will take Windows 7 for example. I connect a new 120GB disk to my Windows 7 and want to replace the old smaller system disk that is 60GB.

Step1: Launch Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition. Click "Disk Copy Wizard" under the left "Wizard" menu.

Step2: In the pop-up window, select disk copy method and click "Next" to continue. In our case we choose "Sector-by-Sector Copy". Another method "Copy Disk Quickly", please refer to copy disk to disk for data security.



Step3: On the next window of the wizard, select source disk (the hard drive you want to clone) and click "Next" to continue.



Step4: On the Select Destination Disk window, choose the target disk (a hard drive to clone contents of the source disk) and click "Next" to continue.



Step5: This page tells you how to boot operating system from the destination disk. Then, click "Finish" to return the main window.



Step6: You can preview the operations you did. To save the changes, you must click "Apply" on the toolbar.



After clicking Apply, a window will pop up, listing the "Pending Operations". Confirm the operations you did and click "Proceed" to execute.

When cloning is completed, you can also resize/move partition and extend system partition to merge the unallocated space without losing data.