**Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through these links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
There are many reasons one might want to clone their Windows drive to another disk. It may be a case of wanting to upgrade to a larger or faster hard drive or maybe your drive is failing and you want to move your Windows installation, programs and files to a new drive before it does without having to reinstall everything. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Windows system drive to another disk with Casper 11.
Casper 11 is a PC backup application that also has disk cloning capabilities. It will cost you around $60 to purchase but there is a 30 day trail period where you can use it for free which will give you enough time to clone your hard drive during the trail. And if you want to use the other backup features, you can buy a license after the trial has expired. You can download the Casper 11 Home trial software from their website.
For our example, we will be cloning our Windows system drive to a larger hard drive. As you can see in the image of Disk Management below, the old drive is 80GB and the new drive is 100GB and currently does not have any volumes or partitions created on it.
To begin the process, we will open the Casper 11 program and on the main screen we will choose Create a Bootable Backup. There are other cloning options such as cloning a disk or partition but you need to do an OS clone so it will be bootable when it’s completed.
We will then click on Add drive under Back up to this drive and select the destination drive where the image will be cloned to. As you can see, there are also options to update your backup on a schedule as well as send an alert when the backup job is completed.
One thing to keep in mind when it comes to system image backups or clones is that they are only as current as the date and time that they were created. So, if you restore a backup image that is 6 months old or start using the drive you cloned 6 months ago, everything you did on your computer since the backup or clone was made will be lost. Of course, if you are backing up your files on a regular basis, you will at least have a current copy of those.
When you are ready to begin the cloning process, simply click on the button that says Back up now. The length of time it takes to complete the Windows system clone will vary based on the size of your source disk and how much data is on it.
You can also configure the email alerts from here and also have the app turn off the computer for you when the cloning process is complete.
Once the system clone is complete, you will see a summary screen showing you how long the process took.
Now when we go back to Disk Management, we can see that our destination drive has the same partition layout as the source drive. One nice feature of Casper 11 is that it will automatically use all the space on the new drive if it’s larger in size. Many other cloning apps will either leave the extra space as unallocated or require you to manually resize the destination drive partition before starting the cloning process.
Now that the Windows system drive has been cloned to the other disk, you can shut down the computer and remove the old drive or change the boot order or cables to make your PC boot from the newly cloned drive.
For additional training resources, check out our online IT training courses.
