How to Clone/Copy Windows to a New Hard Drive (HDD) or Solid State Drive (SSD) - Acronis True Image

A great way to improve the performance of your computer is to upgrade from your old mechanical hard drive to a SSD (Solid State Drive). However when upgrading the drive containing Windows (or any other operating system) it's nice to be able to keep all your old applications and files and not have to start from scratch and reinstall all your programs and copy over all your important files manually. The good news is there are Drive Cloning utilities out there like Acronis True Image that allow you to clone your old hard drive bit for bit so you can upgrade your OS drive and keep all your stuff just the way you had it. This video is designed to help beginners who have never done anything like this before download and install Acronis True Image, Clone their OS (Windows) drive and then switch the Boot Priority in their motherboard BIOS/UEFI. Get ready... you're about to not be a drive cloning noob any more. :)

Like my videos? Want to help support the channel? Leave a comment, click the "Like" button, subscribe and share my videos with your friends. You can also purchase items I feature in my videos by shopping at my Amazon store here -

Wanna skip to a particular part of the video? Use the Time Stamps. :)

Time Stamps

0:00 - HDD's are slow! Get an SSD! :)
0:48 - First you need to install your SSD
1:21 - Clone your drive with Acronis True Image
2:15 - Where to Download True Image
3:08 - How to Install and set up True Image
4:52 - The True Image interface
5:33 - Cloning your Old drive to your SSD
9:44 - Changing the Boot Priority in BIOS/UEFI
12:02 - Thanks for Watching! Like, Share, Comment & Subscribe! :)

Music in this video - "Flames" by Dan Henig from the YouTube Creator Studio Music Library

#SSD, #M.2, #CloneWindows

[Maraksot]

Wanna skip to a particular part of the video? Use the Time Stamps. :)

Time Stamps

0:00 - HDD's are slow! Get an SSD! :)
0:48 - First you need to install your SSD
1:21 - Clone your drive with Acronis True Image
2:15 - Where to Download True Image
3:08 - How to Install and set up True Image
4:52 - The True Image interface
5:33 - Cloning your Old drive to your SSD
9:44 - Changing the Boot Priority in BIOS/UEFI
12:02 - Thanks for Watching! Like, Share, Comment & Subscribe! :)

[karenward-johnson]

Western Digital now provide a more basic free version of Acronis for use with WD drives. It does cloning, back-up, New Disk and drive cleaning and I'm using it right now to clone my WD HDD to a WD SSD at no charge.

[GC-rvvp]

For somebody that only delves into the innards of their computer on rare occasions, and then immediately forgets everything, you made the mystical, easy - thanks!

[jamesgrieve]

Dude! Your videos have been clear and easy to understand. Thank you! I managed to successfully install a new SSD (as I needed more storage space) and clone my copy of windows for the first time. #feelinghappy

[felicitybrown]

but this tool cannot let me clone my bad sector what to do

[lauryn]

This tool will not work for the disk with bad sector, but aomei did.

[derrickfarthing]

This video was really helpful. I just cloned and swopped my original 128GB 90% full SSD c drive for a 1TB SSD. Everything works fine Thank you.

[joshuahiggins]

Very helpful as I’ve had very little pc building experience I’ve used a lot of your videos to help me along the way. Every single one has been very helpful and worked each time

[alexbuentello]

I was sooo confused and scared about trying this but you definitely explained it perfectly thank you 😭👌

[jontoubeaux]

Thanks for the easy to follow tutorial. Worked perfectly in my Dell Inspiron 5675 desktop. I had a 3TB HDD from 08/2015 and switched to a new 1 TB WD SN570 NVMe. I removed my HDD, restarted and the Dell recognized the NVMe as primary boot immediately, no issues. I began by using Macrium but it kept giving me errors (0 & 23) so I used Acronis (got it free because I had the WD drives) and it cloned in one take - approximately 30 minutes for approximately 250 GB.

[thegoldninja]

The first pc I built started off with just a cheap AMD Athon 3000g with 8gbs of ram and a 500gb HDD. I have slowly upgraded all of my parts to an RTX 3070, Ryzen 5 3600x, and 16gb of fast ram. Despite these upgrades I was confused as to why my pc still had trouble loading games and took a while to get up and running and recently learned that storage has a big impact on performance. I just bought a 1tb M.2 drive and am excited to experience faster load times! Thanks for the video

[siminye]

I used to clone with acronis but for now I meet bugs and cannot clone, really upset

[ThunderDan]

Liked and subbed. Exactly what I was looking for man. Between this vid and your "new drive install" vid, I feel comfortabale that I can upgrade my boot drive. Thank you thank you thank you. Now to find an "upgrade Ram" vid on your channel. :)

[threemonkens]

Excellent tutorial! Spoken in simple terms and easy to follow Acronis software. This western digital customer loves that you made the link for initializing (from your previous video) so readily available. Just upgraded from a 750 gig hdd to a 2tb ssd without a single hitch! My almost 10 year old Asus q500 has never been snappier! THANKS SO

[hunterjoy]

I just want to know how to convert a disk to gpt if i have files on it and i don't want to delete them, any tools recommend? I find aomei partition seems good to deal with it, whatever let's see.

[captainfluffybear]

this video is very well made, you deserve more views

[Vicky-zduv]

Cloning failed with Acronis but worked with Ao mei backupp, this one is better.

[rubyzeng]

I followed your steps but for the cloning tool I choose aomei and finally worked well, thank you

[ZELATEUR]

Aww man I wish I knew this before building my pc so I wouldn't have to litteraly copy paste all my files and reinstall all my programs.
Next time I know what to do.
Wakanda Forever.

[enzuki]

What about if I want to only clone a partition? As I have a 1TB HDD thats partitioned however the new SSD is only 512GB so is there a way to only clone local disk (C:) as with both disk (C:) and (D:) combined is already more than 700GB