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There are many reasons one might want to clone their hard drive to another hard drive including upgrading to a larger or faster drive or moving your data to a new drive because your current hard drive is failing. Regardless of the reason, cloning your drive is a great way to copy your operating system (Windows), programs and personal files to a new drive so you do not have to reinstall your OS and all your applications and copy all your personal files over to your new drive.
There are several ways to clone a drive such as a disk clone or partition clone. But if you want to make a bootable copy of your Windows drive, you will need to do an OS or system clone. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Windows system drive using Macrium Reflect.
Macrium Reflect is an application that can be used for Windows image backups, file level backups and hard drive cloning. The program used to be free but now it will cost you around $50 for a yearly subscription. The good part is that you get a free 30 day fully functional trial which is more than enough time to clone your drive before the trial expires.
Once you have Macrium Reflect downloaded and installed, simply run the program and click on the Create Backups tab. Then you will need to select the hard drive that has Windows installed which should be selected by default. Under the drive partitions will be a link that says Clone this disk that you will need to click on to start the process. One thing you may want to do first is run your normal file backup to make sure you have a current copy of your data just in case something goes wrong with the cloning process.
You will then need to click on the link that says Select a disk to clone to in order to choose the destination drive.
Once you have your destination disk selected, you can click on Copy Partitions and then decide if you want your partition sizes from the source disk to be the exact same size on the destination disk. If you are cloning to a larger hard drive, you can choose the Shrink or extend to fill the target disk option so that all the space on your new drive will be available for use. If you do not choose this option, you will be left with leftover unallocated space on your destination disk. If you do have extra unallocated space, you most likely can extend your drive later if needed.
As you can see in the image below, the C drive on the source disk is 64GB while the matching partition on the destination disk is 100GB.
Once you are sure everything looks correct, you can click on the Finish button to move on to the next step.
You will then be prompted to save your backup configuration in case you want to use it again later. This is probably not necessary since you will most likely only be performing the clone process one time. If you do not want to save your backup configuration, simply uncheck the box next to Save as a Backup Definition File and click on the OK button.
Now the cloning procedure will take place, and you will see a status indicator telling you how far along in the process you are.
Once the cloning process is complete, you can open the Windows Disk Management tool to see your original and cloned drive and they should look identical except for the size of the Windows partition.
The final step involves making the cloned disk the primary drive so your computer boots from this new drive rather than the older drive. You may need to go into your BIOS\UEFI settings and change the boot order. Or you can do something like swap the hard drive cables if they are both the same type or simply remove the old drive so the only bootable drive in your computer is the newly cloned drive.
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