How to Move OS to Another Drive without Reinstalling and Data Loss

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Why Transfer the Operating System to A New Drive

With the continuous use of the computer, the available storage space of the hard disk will gradually decrease and lead to low disk space problems. Moving the OS to a large disk or new SSD and using the old disk as a secondary device to store personal data is a good choice.

The system hard drive may fail due to overload, service time limit, virus, or other unknown reasons. Transferring the operating system from the old hard drive to the new one can help you reboot the system and back to your normal work immediately without reinstalling the operating system and applications.

Another big reason to migrate a current Windows OS is to save the time and effort to reinstall the systems and applications and reconfigure the settings that are required for a clean install. To transfer your operating system to a new drive with the help of a system migration software, you can keep your system files and personal data intact.

Above all, if you need to migrate your OS to a new SSD or another HDD, we'll explore how to move your Windows OS to another drive in this article.

Moving Windows OS to another with a disk cloning software

Donemax Disk Clone is the system migration software we recommend you try to move Windows OS to another drive or SSD. It can easily clone a system partition or disk to another and keep the data the same as the source disk. Additionally, the cloning software offers sector-level cloning to ensure you completely clone all the sectors on the drive and make 1:1 clone of the hard disk. It helps you clone the OS to another hard drive in Windows 11/10/8/7/XP/Vista.

It provides two cloning methods: disk cloning, and partition cloning to meet different needs.
A partition clone is capable of copying a partition to an existing section or unallocated space. Then you will have 2 same partitions on your PC with the same data.

To migrate the operating system, the disk cloning is recommended, which ensures that the disk layout is consistent with the source system disk. If you want to copy every sector of the selected system drive (usually the C: drive) to the destination disk, you can check the box before sector-by-sector clone.

How to Move the Operating System to Another Drive in Windows 11/10/8/7?

1. Preparation: connect the new hard disk for cloning

Before moving the operating system to the new drive or SSD, you need to install or connect the target hard drive to your computer and make sure it is detected.

If the computer is a desktop, you can use the extra slot to install it inside. However, if your computer is a laptop, you will need a USB cable, adapter, and case to connect the target drive as an external hard drive at first for cloning.
In most cases, hard drives use SATA slots, but it's safe to check before buying a new hard drive because there are other disk interfaces, such as M.2, PCIe, IDE, SCSI, etc.

2. Transfer Operating System to Another Hard Drive in Windows 10, 11

Step 1: Launch Donemax Disk Clone. To transfer Windows OS, please select the system disk as the source disk and the newly installed hard disk as the target disk. If you want to clone the disk at the sector level, please check the box before Sector-by-sector clone.

Step 2: Check and edit the disk layout of the target disk. If you are cloning the disk to an SSD, check the option "If the target is an SSD".

Step 3: click "Clone" to start the OS cloning.

After cloning, you can start the system from the newly installed hard disk.

How to boot the Operating System from a new hard drive:

Step 1. Shut down your computer.
Step 2. Install the new hard drive with a screwdriver to replace the original drive.
Step 3. Close the computer's cover and connect the power cord.
Step 4. Boot your computer and press a F2, F8 or Del to enter the BIOS setting. You will see it on the initial screen.
Step 5. Go to the Boot tab and change the boot order and set the new hard drive on top as the first boot order. After that, save the changes and reboot to see if it boots from the new drive.

FAQs on moving OS to another drive

In Conclusion

That's how to transfer the operating system to another hard drive. Donemax Disk Clone is a professional disk cloning tool that makes partition cloning or disk cloning easier for ordinary users. ItW provides expert features such as SSD alignment, sector-by-sector cloning, etc. which ensures that you can successfully boot your computer from the cloned hard drive. Besides, it allows you to clone the OS drive to a smaller SSD in Windows.