It’s tempting to upgrade your equipment because even the greatest SSDs are ridiculously affordable these days. But moving from one drive to another might be exhausting. You have your operating system, apps, settings, and data, and it would take ages to reinstall Windows (or Linux) from scratch, and you would probably spend weeks looking for stuff you still needed to add back. Solution: Clone your SSD.
With drive cloning, moving your installation from an older, slower disc to a faster, larger drive is quick and easy. There are numerous approaches to doing this, and Clonezilla is among the finest. This live Linux distribution launches from a USB drive or CD/DVD. It employs a wizard-based approach to switch between discs quickly, makes installation images, and even distributes operating systems to several machines via a network.
Using Your New Drive with the PC to Create a Copy
You need a way to connect both drives to the computer simultaneously if you wish to transfer the data on your PC’s boot disc to a new, faster, or larger alternative. You can attach the new drive to its M.2 or SATA port and install it in your case if your desktop has room for it.
You’ll need some enclosure that enables you to attach the new drive to a USB port, though, if you’re using a laptop or don’t have enough space to have both drives in your computer at once. Take a 2.5-inch SATA case if the new drive is that type (opens in new tab). Grab an M.2 to USB case if it’s an M.2 NVMe or SATA drive (opens in new tab).
When the cloning is finished, if you’re using an enclosure, you’ll need to open your computer and replace the old drive with the new one. See our tutorial on securely wiping an SSD or hard disc if you intend to sell or donate the old drive.
Windows cloning (or Another OS)
We move a Windows 10 installation from a 64GB eMMC disc to a 256GB NVMe SSD for the screenshots and instructions below. To migrate installations from older drives to SSD or to clone a disc as a backup, for example, we can use the same procedure.
After Cloning, Extending Your Partition
The migration is finished, but we still need to ensure our operating system boots and expands the partition so it takes up the entire drive. Windows 10 was utilized; however, Windows 11 should follow the same procedures.
1. If you need to keep both drives in the same computer, swap in the new drive.
2. Turn on the computer and choose the new drive as the boot drive in the BIOS. Each system has a different method, so see the motherboard documentation.
3. Start Windows in this scenario.
4. Click on This PC in the File Manager after opening it. To utilize the entire capacity of the NVMe SSD, we must expand the partition.
5. Get MiniTool Partition Wizard Free and set it up.
6. Click on the recovery partition after starting MiniTool. This partition is unnecessary because it prohibits us from using the entire drive’s storage space. If there is no partition between the Windows installation and the unallocated space.
7. If you might not have this partition in the same location. Select Delete with a right-click on the partition.
8. To remove the recovery partition, click Apply.
9. Select the Windows partition by clicking.
10. To extend, right-click the partition and choose Extend.
11. Choose the unallocated space and adjust the slider to the size you require. Select OK. We decided to utilize the drive’s full capacity.
12. To extend the partition, click Apply.
13. Check that the drive capacity has been increased by returning to the File Manager on this PC.
