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With hard drives becoming larger and larger in size while still being reasonably cheap, it makes sense that many people would want to upgrade their computer with some extra storage space. You might also be in a situation where you want to upgrade to a faster hard drive such as an SSD or NVMe drive. Replacing a hard drive is not that difficult, especially if you have built your own computer.
But if you want to upgrade to a larger or faster drive and keep Windows, your programs and your files intact then you can clone your system drive to make a bootable copy of it on the new disk. This also comes in handy if your current drive is starting to fail and you want to make a copy of it before it’s too late. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Windows system drive for free with Hasleo Backup Suite.
Hasleo Backup Suite does more than just clone your hard drive. It has also image, partition and file level backup features so it’s a great tool to use for your regular backups that you should be doing on a regular basis! They do have a standalone disk cloning tool that you can use if you do not need the backup features. You can find both apps on their website here.
For our example, we will be cloning the 80 GB C drive on our computer that contains Windows as well as some installed programs and user files. We will be cloning this drive to a larger 100GB drive so we will have some extra space for our Windows drive and programs.
After you install and run Hasleo Backup Suite, you will choose the Clone option and then click on System Clone. You do not want to choose disk clone or partition clone because they will not be bootable if you use one of those methods.
Now you will need to select your source disk which will be your Windows drive. It should be selected automatically but you should make sure that the correct disk is selected.
After you click on the Next button, you will need to choose the destination\new disk and click on Next again.
As you can see in the image below, since the destination disk is 20 GB larger than the source disk, there will be 20 GB of leftover unallocated space once the cloning is complete.
If you want to change the size of recovery partition at the end (642 MB), you can click on it and drag the slider to make it larger and use some or all the leftover 20 GB of space. Since your hard drive configuration may not look the same, you might want to just leave things as they are and then extend your C drive to use the extra space when the process is complete.
Once the configuration looks correct, you can click on the Proceed button. The cloning process should not take too long but will vary depending on the size of your source disk and how much data is being cloned to the new hard drive.
Once the cloning process is complete, you can then remove the source disk from the computer so only the cloned destination disk is installed if that is your goal. Or you can change any cables or BIOS\UEFI settings to make the cloned disk be the first drive in the boot order, so it doesn’t try and boot from the original drive.
If you open Disk Management after cloning the disk, you should see both disks with the same size system partition\volume. If you now want to extend your new C drive to use any leftover space, you can do so unless you happen to have another partition in between them like the recovery partition in our example.
If you do have another partition between your Windows drive and leftover unallocated space, you will need to move the partition that is in the way over so the partition with Windows and the partition with the free space are next to each other (contiguous). To do so you can follow the steps outlined in this article.
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