How to Migrate Hard Drive to SSD without Reinstalling OS?

To migrate hard drive to SSD without reinstalling OS, you can choose to clone hard drive to SSD with secure boot under the help of disk cloning software – AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

Cherry

By Cherry / Updated on May 12, 2023

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Why migrate hard drive to SSD?

Compared with HDD, SSD owns many advnateds, such as high writing & read speed and better performance. Thus, many users choose to upgrade to SSD. If you are unwilling to reinstall your OS and abandon old data, it’s a nice choice to migrate all data from hard disk drive to SSD.

Replace HDD boot disk with an SSD drive can improve the performance of your PC and meanwhile, schedule defrag your hard drives 

How to: migrate hard drive to SSD without reinstalling 

To transfer all data, programs & OS from hard drive to SSD, you can clone hard drive to SSD.

Here recommended you an easy-to-use and powerful disk cloning software, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional for Windows 10/9.1/8/7, XP and Vista.

✔ It allows you to clone large hard drive to smaller SSD.
✔ It enables you to clone MBR disk to GPT SSD.
✔ It allows you to clone only OS related partitions.
✔ It allows you to make SSD partition for better performance during cloning.

➣ Now, have a look at preparation works for migrating all data from hard drive to SSD.

1. Choose the right SSD for your PC (desktop or laptop). Before you buy an SSD, you need to check your drive’s form factor. Make sure the drive will fit in your laptop or desktop. There are more famous SSD brands you can choose, like Samsung SSD, Seagate SSD, Toshiba SSD, etc. You can choose one that encounters your demands.
2. Move large folders that don't need to be kept on the SSD. Move large folders on the hard drive to another place will save a lot of space on the hard drive. Thus, you will take less time when copy hard drive to SSD. And it is useful if you are planning to transfer hard drive to SSD that is smaller than the hard drive.
3. Uninstall the programs that you aren't using anymore and delete the unnecessary files that you do not want to transfer to the SSD.
4. Backup your current hard drive. Backup hard drive should be the best way to prevent other accidents that may cause data loss.

➣ Then, refer to the detailed steps of how to migrate hard drive data to SSD without reinstalling.

1. Connect SSD to your PC sure the SSD can be detected by your computer. If not, you need to initialize disk with Diskpart or AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

Note: You can download the demo version of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to have a try at first!

Download Demo Win 10/8.1/8/7/XP
Secure Download

2. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. In the home interface, click “Clone” from the top toolbar and then select “Clone Disk”.

3. Choose a way to migrate data from hard drive to SSD and click OK.

The “Clone Disk Quickly” is highly recommended because with this method, you can copy hard drive to a smaller SSD as only it is enough to store data on the old hard drive, and you can edit partition size on the SSD flexible. While the “Sector-by-Sector Clone” will copy every byte on the hard drive no matter it used or not, thus, you can not edit partition size with this method.

4. Choose your source disk and destination disk.

5. Here you can adjust partition size on the destination disk.

6. Click Apply and Proceed button to execute the cloning software.

 

How to boot from the SSD after migrating?

After the migration, you can boot from the SSD perfectly. However, sometimes, you cannot boot successfully in a few cases. If you cannot boot from the SSD, you can try to disconnect the source disk from the computer, or exchange the connection socket of destination disk and source disk, then, boot the computer from the destination disk.

There may be another situation that your computer cannot boot from the destination disk after migration. If you migrate from MBR disk to GPT disk, you need to make sure that your computer supports EFI/UEFI, otherwise, you cannot boot from the GPT disk. Fortunately, AOMEI Partition Assistant allows you to convert system disk between MBR disk and GPT Disk.

Conclusion

With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant, migrate all data from hard drive to SSD without reinstallation becomes much simpler. What’s worth, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional is more than a disk migration software. It can do a lot of things for hard drive partition. For example, you can only migrate OS to SSD with AOMEI Partition Assistant if you do not have a large SSD; if you still want to use the old hard drive to store data, it allows you to reformat the hard drive in a few steps; if you are Windows Server users, it provides you AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition.

Cherry
Cherry · Staff Editor
Cherry is an editor of AOMEI Technology, she covers backup & restore, hard disk & partitions management, cloud files transfer, website & database backup and so on for AOMEI. She enjoys helping people find solutions to their problems. She loves traveling, cooking, reading and so on. She takes most of time with her family when she is not working.