Even though today’s modern computers have very large hard drives, many people still find themselves running out of room and don’t like to delete files or remove software to get their space back. You may also run into a situation where your hard drive is failing and you want to copy Windows, your programs and your files to a new drive before it finally gives out.
This is where the process of hard disk cloning comes into play. When you clone your drive, you are making an exact copy of everything that is on it, including its partition layout. In order to clone your system or Windows drive and make it bootable, you will need software that can handle the task at hand. In this article, we will be showing you how to clone your Windows system drive for free using WittyTool Disk Clone.
In order to use WittyTool, you will first need to download and install it on your computer. If you are using Microsoft Edge to download the software, you might get a message that it was blocked for your safety. You can then click the ellipsis (…) and choose Keep to download the software. We have not found any issues with the software but just like everything else you download, use this at your own risk.
The image below shows the Windows Disk Management tool with the current 70 GB system\Windows drive with the drive letter C. Disk 1 is our new blank 100 GB hard drive that we will be cloning the C drive to.
When you first run the WittyTool software, you will need to click on the Clone option on the left side of the program. Then you will need to click on System migration. You can use the Disk clone option to make a copy of a different drive that does not have an operating system on it or the Partition clone option to copy just a partition on a disk to another disk.
Next, you will need to choose the destination disk which will be where the copy of the system drive will be made.
By default, WittyDisk should configure the destination drive to use all of the available space so if it’s a bigger disk, you will have more free space after the cloning process is complete. If you do not want to use all the space on the destination drive, you can move the slider accordingly.
Once you click the Start Clone button, you will be warned that the data on the target disk will be erased, and you will need to click on Yes to continue.
The length of time it takes to complete the cloning process will be determined by the size of your disk, the disk type and the amount of data on the source disk.
Once the process is complete, you can open Windows Disk Management again to verify that everything was copied over correctly. You can also open File Manager and see how things look.
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