How to Clone the Boot Drive of Windows 10 to Another HDD/SSD

Introduction:

Is there any way to clone the boot drive to another hard disk or SSD? Here are 4 solutions to clone the boot drive to aonther hdd or SSD in Windows 11/10/8/7 and make it bootable.

PAGE CONTENT:

Why Clone the Boot Drive in Windows 11/10/8/7?

Scenario: With the increasing popularity of Windows 10, I upgraded to the Windows 10 some time ago. The overall feeling is pretty good. But after using it for a short time, the computer often crashes and has a blue screen of death. After scanning the boot disk with Disk Management, bad sectors are found. There's no way but to replace the boot disk. how to efficiently and safely clone the boot drive on my original disk to the new disk and ensure successful boot?

How to Clone A Boot Drive and Make it Bootable?

Generally speaking, there are 4 methods to solve the problem if you want to replace the boot drive with a new hdd or SSD in Windows 11/10/8/7. You can choose a right bootable clone solution among them, however, the best and easiest bootable clone solution in Windows we highly recommend is to clone the boot disk with an expert-level disk cloning software - Donemax Disk Clone for Windows.

Method 1: Clone the Boot Drive with Symantec Ghost

You can choose to clone the boot disk through Symantec Ghost in Windows 10. Ghost is a disk imaging software which allows you to create a disk image of the boot drive and then restore to the new drive.

However, it needs to enter the BIOS for some settings to start the program. This method is too professional and challenging to succeed. Moreover, as it is discontinued by Symantec, it has relatively our-of-date interface and doesn't support the latest Windows OS. After the successful cloning, there may be a boot problem if you have two system partitions, so it is not recommended.

Method 2: Reinstall A New Windows OS to Make it Bootable

You can clean reinstall a new Windows 10/11 system on the new disk. This method is relatively stable and ensures the successful boot, but it takes a long time. You need to make a startup USB flash disk first and then change the disk startup order. Meanwhile you need to reinstall all the programs and the important data on the original disk will not be transferred to the new disk. This method can be used as an alternative option. Without additional installation work, I hope to clone the original system to the target disk.

Method 3: Backup and Restore the Windows System

Use backup and restore software to make a disk image of the boot drive and then restore to a new one. This method aims at the files on the disk, which can not be cloned sector by sector, which makes 1:1 clone of HDD or SSD. In this way, it can not ensure that all files are copied to the target disk correctly, and the two steps of backup and restore will take up the some time. The bootable clone efficiency may be low.

Method 4: Copy the Boot Drive with A Disk Cloning Software [Highly Recommended]

It's a good idea to clone the boot drive of Windows with a bootable cloning software Donemax Disk Clone. It supports to clone the boot drive of windows 10/11 and can keep the same disk layout on the new disk after cloning with sector-by-sector clone. You can successfully clone the original boot disk to the target hdd or SSD, aand ensures to start the system successfully after pulling out the original disk. Here I will introduce how to clone the boot drive in windows.

Learn the detailed steps to make a bootable clone in Windows:

Step 1: Select the boot drive as source to clone.

Select the boot disk or partition as the clone source in the pop-up clone window. The target can be an empty disk or unallocated space as the clone target. Click next.

Step 2: Edit the disk layout of target disk.

To edit the disk layout of target disk, you can select auto fit disk layout which will have the same dik layout as the source disk after cloning, or manually edit disk layout.

Step 3: Perform bootable cloning.

After confirmation, click "execute" to start the bootable cloning process.

★ Tip Before Cloning the Boot Disk:

1. Please back up important data on the target disk in advance if it has. Cloning a drive will delete everything on the target disk.

2. Make sure the target disk has enough space to save all the data on the boot disk, especially if the target disk is smaller. Otherwise, the cloning process will fail.

3. Laptops users can connect the target disk through a USB hard disk box and then clone it to the external disk. After cloning, you can disassemble the notebook and replace it with a new disk.

4. If the newly cloned hard disk cannot start up after cloning, please check the boot sequence.

FAQs About Cloning A Boot Drive