How can I clone my hard drive for free?
“I have an aging laptop, recently, every time I start it, I’ll receive the low disk space error message and ask me free up more space. I have uninstalled programs that I no longer use, but that doesn’t seem to help. So I want to clone my hard drive to a new one, what can I do for free? Any suggestions is good. ”
Best Free Hard Drive Cloning Software – AOMEI Backupper Standard
To clone hard drive to another one for free, you just need a free hard drive cloning software. If you don’t have any idea, please continue to read below and I’ll introduce you to one such software.
What is the best hard drive cloning software for Windows 10?
AOMEI Backupper Standard is one of the best free disk cloning software for windows 10 and you still can use it in other systems, such as, Windows 11, Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista. Below are some advantages of it:
- It supports cloning hard drive, both HDD and SSD, eg: clone SSD to SSD in Windows 10, and make the cloned drive bootable.
- It is able to clone all brands of HDD and SSD, such as, WD, Samsung, Seagate, SanDisk, etc.
- It is capable of cloning larger drive to smaller drive with the help of intelligent clone feature, which only clones the used sectors on a disk and skip bad sectors.
- It allows you to improve SSD disk performance with its 4k technology.
If these just what you want, download disk clone software – AOMEI Backupper Standard and clone hard drive with it.
How to clone hard drive in Windows 10 step by step
After downloading and installing the free disk clone software in Windows 10, just open it and follow the steps below. Before starting, please be sure the following things:
- Install your new hard drive on your computer and tighten it. If it is a laptop, you need to prepare a USB-to-SATA cable, adapter, or enclosure to connect it.
- After connecting new hard drive, check if it’s initialized. If not, please initialize disk and create a new partition with disk management.
- Then, check if your new drive is larger than old hard drive and it refers to the used space of them.
- To clone hard drive for free, you still be sure both disk use MBR disk partition style. You can check disk properties in Disk Management and there is partition style option.
Then, continue to see below and follow the steps below to clone hard drive. If you want to make your computer run faster, it’s suggested to clone HDD to SSD for free.
1. Launch the hard drive cloning software – AOMEI Backupper Standard and click Clone -> Disk Clone.
Note: If one of the disks is GPT when clone a hard drive in Windows 10, you need to upgrade to advanced edition, such as, AOMEI Backupper Professional. Since the free version does not supports cloning GPT disk or cloning to GPT disk.
- Select the hard drive in Windows 10 and then, in the next windows, select the new hard drive, both of them should be a MBR disk. Remember to click Next after selecting disk and click OK to confirm you want to clone hard drive.
3. Tick SSD Alignment if you clone SSD to SSD, which helps to accelerate the reading and writing speed for SSD disk. And then click Start Clone to begin cloning hard drive in Windows 10.
Notes:
- Don’t use the Sector by Sector Clone feature if you clone a larger drive to a smaller drive, for example, clone a large HDD to a smaller SSD, otherwise this cloning process will fail and you cannot boot from the cloned drive.
- Besides, you cannot make full use of disk space if clone disk to a larger disk without resizing partitions on the larger one. To clone and resize hard drive, please try adjust unused space to all partitions or adjust partition size manually in the Edit Partitions (supported by the Professional version) feature.
- In advanced editions, you still can clone Windows 10 to NVMe and use NVMe as boot drive.
Summary
AOMEI Backupper Standard is the best free hard drive cloning software in Windows 10, which helps you clone hard drive to another one successfully without boot issue, even from large drive to smaller drive. And it also helps you to boost SSD disk performance.