Replace Computer Hard Disk Drive Without Having To Reinstall Windows 10

Whenever you wish to upgrade your computer system hard disk drive to an SSD or a larger drive, you can do so without having to go through the hassle of re-installing Windows 10, drivers, data transfer and what not. Here’s how you can achieve this;

Plug your new hard disk drive via USB converter or a docking station to your existing computer or laptop and type “disk manager” to fire up Partition management software in Windows 10. You should be able to see two hard disks connected i.e. your system drive and the new hard drive. Now right-click on your original (old) system drive and select “properties” and select “Properties” to determine if the hard disk drive volume is currently formatted with MBR or GPT;

Next, click “Volumes” tab and note down the partition style which is Master Boot Record in my case.

To initialize new hard disk drive or quick format it to make a new logical drive, simply right-click on the new hard disk drive and select “initialize” or “format (quick)” option in the Partition Management tool of Windows 10,;

Next, download and install AOMEI Backupper Standard edition from;

https://www.ubackup.com/download.html

In the AOMEI Backupper, click the “Clone” option on the left and select older hard disk drive as the source disk;

In the next step, click the new hard disk drive as destination disk to start the process of cloning. This might take hours depending on the size of your original (older) hard disk drive. Let it finish by itself and when done, close the AOMEI Backupper.

Next, download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard from;

https://www.diskpart.com/free-partition-manager.html

Make sure all of your partitions are same size like the older drive. If you notice any unallocated or unused space left at the end of your new hard disk drive, simply click the last drive letter of your new computer hard disk drive and select “Merge Partitions” option from the left menu. Next, select the last unallocated space and hit “Apply” button to finish making changes to your newly partitioned hard disk drive which is ready to be replace by physically removing the older hard disk drive.