Clone Hard Drive with Best Disk Cloning Software

Why Clone Hard Drive

Today it's a very common requirement for most Windows users to clone a hard drive to another one. As for the reasons, most of them want to copy hard drive to a larger one due to insufficient disk space, some of them want to clone hard drive to SSD for higher efficiency, and some just clone hard drive in Windows 7/8/10 for data backup. No matter what the reason is, it is an indisputable fact that cloning hard drive is now a public demand.

In many cases, users do hard drive clone by using the simplest way copy & paste, which is not a safe method and is time-consuming. Obviously, clone is a better choice than copy & paste. To explain why, we should refer to the difference between copy and clone.

Difference between Clone and Copy

So what's the difference between clone and copy? Copy means to make a same version, while clone means more. Clone not only guarantees the files are the same, but also guarantees the same physical location as they are in the source disk. In some cases, a file requires fixed and specified location for normal operation. Once the file is moved, it won't work anymore. So generally speaking, clone is a safer way to replicate data.

Having said all of the above, let's cut to the point: how to copy a hard drive?

"Clone is a much safer way than copy & paste in data protecting, so clone hard drive is recommended when transferring all data to another hard drive."
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How to Clone a Hard Drive

1.Best Program to Clone/Copy a Hard Drive

In fact, disk cloning can be easily solved by using professional partition magic, and the best one is the one that works for you. So there is no unique answer to the question which partition magic is the best disk cloning software. Usually, free and reliable software is always the first choice. So here MiniTool Partition Wizard is strongly recommended to you.

MiniTool Partition Wizard free edition is a piece of windows clone software helps you to copy hard drive to another without data loss. Actually, for MiniTool Partition Wizard, disk copy equals to disk clone, and it even provides Sector-by-Sector copy technology. So you don't need to worry about the accident mentioned in the previous content after cloning a hard drive. Besides, this partition magic can be employed on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10, both 32 bit and 64 bit.

Note: Sector-by-Sector Copy means to copy all sectors of the source disk to the target disk no matter the sector is used or not.

2.Preparatory work

• Make sure the target disk is successfully connected to the same computer;
• Make sure the storage space of the target disk is large enough to hold all the data in the source disk;
• Initialize the target disk to the same disk style with the source one;
• Make sure the data on the target disk have been backed up because all of them will be destroyed.

3.Steps of Cloning

Step 1: Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard. Right click the source partition you are going to clone and choose "Copy". You can also choose "Copy Partition Wizard" in the left column.



Step 2: Then you should select a target disk to go on.



Step 3: In this page, four options are provided for you to customize the disk clone.

• Fit partitions to entire disk: automatically adjust the partition size to occupy the entire space of the target disk;
• Copy partitions without resize: only works when the target disk is larger than the source disk and will clone HDD Sector-by-Sector.
• Edit partitions on this disk: allow users to adjust the partition size during the process.
• Force to align partitions on this disk: this will improve the performance for Advanced Format disk & SSD.

Step 4: Copy Disk Wizard will tell you how to boot from the destination disk. If you are cloning the system disk, you should pay more attention. After that, click "Finish" to go back to the main interface.



Step 5: Here you can preview the changes you are going to make to the target disk. After confirmation, press "Apply" to make all the changes effective.



That's all for Windows disk clone. In addition, you can also clone a partition by employing "Copy Partition Wizard". After you have finished the clone, you can also resize/move/delete partition with free MiniTool Partition Wizard, which is indeed amazing freeware.

Conclusion

Windows disk clone is now a public demand, and MiniTool Partition Wizard is a great hard drive cloner. It is the best freeware with simple, fast and safe operations. Having such an excellent software available, why not download it to be your private assistant?