Plug the external drive into the PC that has a new hard drive installed.

Make sure your PC is turned off before going through these steps.

If you instead cloned to an external hard drive, you'll have to go through a couple of extra steps to get Windows working again on the new drive once you have it installed. If you cloned your original drive to an internal drive using an enclosure, you can simply install the new drive in your PC and turn it on. How to restore your clone on a new hard drive You can now continue with steps seven to ten in the preceding section. A blue rectangle will appear when the disk is selected. In this case, I'm choosing my C: drive because it is the drive I'm swapping out. Launch Macrium Reflect from your Start menu, desktop or taskbar.It's also good practice to clean up any files on your system, especially if you're moving to a smaller drive - you can't have more data than the new drive can hold. See at Acronis (opens in new tab) How to clone your hard driveīefore you begin with Macrium Reflect, ensure the drive you're going to clone to is connected to your PC. For just the cloning and backup software, you'll spend about $40. Just don't expect a fancy user interface.Īcronis True Image: There are a few buying options to choose from when it comes to Acronis - there is also a 30-day free trial (opens in new tab) - including subscription options that come with 50GB or 1TB of cloud storage. It supports a ton of file systems and it plain works. Its UI is super simple to use, and you can even set an automatic file sync that will keep your backup up to date.Ĭlonezilla: This free, open-source cloning tool has been around for a long time, and with good reason.

AOMEI Backupper: Like Macrium Reflect, there is a fully-functional, free version of AOMEI that lets you create system images, back up hard drives, and clone drives.

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