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With today’s computers getting faster and hard drive capacity getting larger, it makes sense that you would want to take advantage of these newer technologies so you can achieve the best performance possible from your computer.
If you are still using a spinning disk (HDD) for Windows and your programs, you may want to consider upgrading to a solid state (SSD) or other type of flash drive such as an NVMe drive so your operating system, programs and games will run at their best.
You may also have a situation where your hard drive is beginning to fail and giving you errors, and you want to replace it before it completely fails, and you lose all your data. Then again you should also be backing up your computer on a regular basis to prevent this! This is where cloning your hard drive can save the day. Cloning a drive makes an exact copy of the drive including its partition layout to another hard drive. So, if you want to upgrade to a faster or larger drive, it’s a great solution. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Windows system drive with TeraByte Image for Windows.
There are many cloning apps available that do a great job of making a copy of your hard drive but the main feature you need to look for is the ability to create a bootable copy of your system drive so your computer can actually load Windows and allow you to use the new drive without needing to reinstall Windows and all your programs. TeraByte Image for Windows has this capability.
For our example, we will be cloning our 80GB C drive to a new 100GB hard drive. The image below shows our disk layout in the Windows Disk Management tool. You can see that the Windows drive (Disk 0) has 3 partitions and our new 100GB drive (Disk 1) is empty and doesn’t even have a volume\partition created on it.
Now we will run the TeraByte Image for Windows software which can be downloaded from their website here. One thing you need to be aware of is that TeraByte is not free, but they do offer a fully functional 30 day trial so if you just need to do a one time clone, then you can technically do it for free. The software can do much more than just clone drives so if you want to use the other features, you may want to purchase a license.
When you first install the software, you will see a message asking if you want to use simple or traditional mode. Since we are just using the cloning feature and not the backup feature, we will choose simple mode but of course you can use whichever one you like. The traditional mode will give you full control over the backup options.
You will then have several shortcut icons for the app, and you will want to open the one named Image for Windows.
Once you are in the main interface, you will that there is a backup option and copy option. We will be using the copy tool to make a clone of our Windows system drive.
Once you click on Copy and then the Next button, it will start the clone disk wizard and ask you to choose your source drive which will be the disk that Windows is installed on. Make sure to choose the correct drive for this step. You should be able to figure out which is the source drive based on its size and drive number which will match the disk number in Disk Management. Then you can click the Next button.
Now you will need to select the destination disk which will be the hard drive that you want to clone the disk to. Then you can click Next once again.
You will then be shown a summary screen and if everything looks correct, you can click the Start button to begin the process. You can also schedule the clone job if you want to run it later when you are not using your computer.
Then the disk cloning process will begin and can take several minutes depending on the size and speed of your disks as well as how much data is on them. The Power Options can be used to do things such as shut down, reboot or suspend your computer after the clone job is complete.
When the cloning process is complete, you will be shown a summary window and can click the Menu button to go back to the main screen.
The image below shows how Disk Management looks after cloning the drive. As you can see, TeraByte Image for Windows was able to allocate the extra space from the larger destination drive to the main Windows partition so you can use it for your apps and other files. Many disk cloning tools will not do this, and you are stuck with extra unallocated space that requires you to manually expand your Windows partition.
Now that you have your Windows drive cloned to your new disk, you can either change the boot order of your computer or swap the drives or cables (if used) and then boot your computer to the new drive. Then you can either keep your old drive as a backup or wipe it and use it for extra storage.
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