After upgrading your laptop or desktop computer hard drive disk to SSD or NVMe SSD, you have to reinstall Windows and other applications and customize the settings. It is time-consuming and needs to re-download Windows Update. Although you can easily move Windows 10 to SSD free within a few minutes. This Windows 10 OS migration can do easily using free software and it copy the Windows license key and all other installed software with its settings. So you don’t need to worry.
Solid State Drive or SSD is known for a high-performance storage drive. To enhance the laptop or desktop computer performance, we can easily upgrade to a hard drive to SSD or NVMe SSD. Unlike the traditional hard drive disks (HDD), solid-state drives are lightning-fast, you can boot your computer within a few seconds. If you have a PCI-X slot you can get extremely high speed than the traditional SATA slot.
This OS clone HDD to SSD has a few requirements, your HDD Operating System (OS) installed partition size (typically “C” drive) used space should not be larger than your new SSD drive. For instance, the “C” drive used space is 100GB your new Solid State Drive should be larger than 120GB. In that situation, you have to go for a 250GB drive. For best performance SSD/NVMe SSD drive 25% should be free.
How to Clone Windows 10 New Drive Free Without Reinstall Windows.
- Download and install the Disk Genius free Windows OS Clone tool in here. It’s not only clone software, but it can also do many more things.
- The left side lists all the available hard drives. Select the OS installed partition.
- Next click on the “OS Migration” button at the Disk Genius menu.
- In the “Select Target Disk” select the SSD or Nvme new drive. If you have more than 2 drives you have to select the correct one.
- Next in the “System Migration Settings” window, make sure it enabled “Prevent System from Sleeping During Execution”. Leave other options as it’s including system, MBR, and ESP partition size.
- To start the copy of Windows 10 to SSD click on the “Start” button. It will take a few minutes to copy all the C partition files.
- Once Windows 10 migration is completed, click the “Finish” button. and boot into the BIOS and set the new SSD drive as a bootable drive.
Delete Old OS Installed Partitions.
This free disk clone tool does not delete the old bootable hard drive partitions. Once you boot from the PC from the new drive, you can keep it or format. In my situation, I kept it as a hidden partition by simply removing the drive letter. In case if anything goes wrong, then I can simply change the boot option and start the laptop using the old disk. If you don’t have enough space, after moving Windows 10 to SSD, you can simply delete the old drive partitions.
- After successfully copied, Windows, select the old Windows installed partition on the left-hand side. Normally in Windows listed “HD1” as the old hard disk and “HD0” as the newly connected hard disk. (If your laptop or PC has two storage ports for instance if it has a PCIx port and SATA port OR if you replace your DVD ROM using an SSD optical drive caddy)
- Right-click on the partition that you need to delete. Then click on “Delete current Partition (Del)”.
- The next confirmation window clicks the “OK” button to proceed.
- Follow the above steps to delete other remaining “Systems, MSR, Recovery” partitions on your old hard drive.
If you like fresh installation, you can use my previous create windows bootable USB tutorial. Fresh Windows installation needs to redownload your required software. It’s a bit time-consuming. But personally, I recommend reinstalling windows.
