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Cloning your hard drive is a popular procedure that many Windows users seem to be doing these days. It’s a great option if you want to upgrade to a larger or faster hard drive such as an SSD or NVMe drive. It’s also a good option if you have a failing hard drive and want to move your Windows installation, programs and files over to a new drive before it fails without having to reinstall everything. It can also come in handy if you built yourself a new computer and want to clone your Windows installation to a new drive for the new PC.
Many people like to create Windows system image backups and keep those as a way to restore their computer, but this does not work the same as cloning the drive since it’s more of a backup procedure and only as current as the day you made it. Plus, it can be difficult to take one of these system image backups and restore it to a different computer. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Windows system drive to another hard drive with Active Disk Image.
To clone your Windows system drive to another drive, you will need another drive of course and it should be the same size or larger than the drive you want to clone. You should also make sure you are not using it for storing programs or files because they will be getting wiped during the process.
For our example, we will be cloning our 75GB Windows drive to a new 100GB hard drive. As you can see in the image below, the drive is initialized but does not have a volume created on it which is fine since it will be getting reconfigured by Active Disk Image.
Once you download and install Active Disk Image, you can then open the program and double click on the Clone Disk icon.
Next, you will need to choose your source drive which will be the one that Windows is installed on. If you select the Disk number, it will include all the partitions on that drive.
Next, you will need to select the destination drive. If you only have one extra drive, it will be your only option since your C drive will be greyed out since it was already chosen as the source drive.
On the next screen you will have the option to keep any existing partitions on the destination disk but you may not want to do that since you want to make a clone of your Windows drive and probably don’t want other partitions to be on the cloned drive.
You will then be shown a summary screen and can click the Next button to start the cloning process which can take any where from 10-30 minutes depending on the size of your drive and how much existing data is on it.
You will then be able to watch the progress of the cloning procedure and have an idea of how much time it will take to complete.
Once the process is complete, you will be able to go back to Disk Management and see that the new drive has an image of the old drive on it with matching partitions. If you have cloned to a larger drive, you may see some leftover unallocated space. You can use this space for a new volume or extend the current C drive to use the leftover space.
You will also notice that the cloned disk is offline, which is fine because you do not want to have two system drives active the next time you boot your computer. If you hover over the information icon for the hard drive it will say “The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online”.
You can now shut down your computer and remove the old drive to make the cloned copy the main drive and boot from that. You may have to configure your BIOS\UEFI settings to set the new boot drive unless you are using the same motherboard connection as the old one. Active Disk Image provides a free 21 day fully functional trial which is plenty of time to clone your disk for free. But if you plan on using the other backup features or cloning disks on a regular basis, you can buy your own copy for $39.
If you want to expand your drive to use the leftover space, you can use the free NIUBI Partition Editor software to do so. You can check out our writeup of the process to see how its done.
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