Clone your Operating System to a new drive

It is a jungle out there and I want to help. Was recently faced with the task of needing to clone my OS drive contents to a larger drive. In my case from a 500 GB Western Digital Black Nvme drive to a 1 TB one.

First thing I reached after was the good old HBCD USB stick, but none of the software packages could do what I needed. Either they lacked the feature or the feature was not included in the free version of the software. Disappointing. Maybe my version was old. After quick research on the matter, I ended up trying Acronis True Image and AOMEI Backupper and Partition Assistant. The first one asked for money. The second had the features I need in their free software package but got greedy and after some rise in popularity, they also put the feature behind a paywall.

Not going to use this kind of software that often to justify any other price than free. Digging through the comment section in a youtube video some fellow citizen walking in the same shoes suggested that it might be worth trying to change both drives so that they are the same partition style. So if one is MBR (Master Boot Record) and the other is GPT (GUID Partition Table), you should try converting both to GPT. The latter being the more modern btw. This was a surprise for me. Back in my day... :) we all used MBR. Anyways here is a comparison if you are interested in the differences. Needless to say, it didn't work.

Digging deeper I found DiskGenius. This is all you need to know. It is free as of writing this and it comes with tons of features. I'd suggest a download and storage in a software toolbox folder since this might change and go the way of AOMEI.

With this tool, I successfully cloned my Windows 10 operating system drive contents to a new, larger drive. It handled the repartitioning too. No hair loss, no boot issues or anything. I'll probably never use this software again in the next 5-10 years so I'm not going to pay 40-50 dollars thank you. Hope this info helps someone.

Cheers!

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