Hi, you want to replace the old hard drive with a new one with a larger capacity
Or you want to replace the traditional hard drive with a solid-state drive to improve performance
Currently my computer uses a traditional hard drive, I want to clone to a solid state drive to improve performance
But I don't want to reinstall the operating system and the software so what should I do?
Do you need any software to do this or does it cost money to buy it?
Fortunately, on Windows operating systems, the necessary tools are available to do this
Please join me in cloning the hard drive using the command prompt in this video
I added both hard drives to my computer and make sure the computer detects both hard drives
First you need to create an OS image for your source hard drive
So you need a place to store that image, you can use external memory to store it
Because on a traditional hard drive there is still a lot of free space, so I created a new partition to store images of the Windows operating system.
You should check your current operating system size to create a partition large enough for storage
Your operating system will be significantly compressed when creating the image file
To create an image file of the Windows operating system, restart your computer and access the recovery environment
So how to boot into OS recovery environment
You press and hold the shift key on your keyboard and restart your computer
Press the key and wait
And here is the Windows OS recovery environment
You open the command prompt to create the operating system image
Troubleshoot
Advanced options
Command prompt
You need to define the operating system partition and the partition where the image file will be stored before doing so
You use the diskpart command to check
So partition C contains the operating system and partition E is where the operating system image file will be stored
You then use the above command to create an operating system image file
This file is called Windows Operating System
If your partition is assigned with other characters, replace accordingly
And here is the file you will get, it's quite small in size
After obtaining the image file, you exit the recovery environment and return to the Windows operating system to perform the next steps
You go to partition D and you will see your Windows operating system image file
So how to restore it to the new hard drive
On the new hard drive you create the necessary partitions for the Windows operating system
If you use cloning software you are probably only interested in the source hard drive and the destination hard drive
But this way you will know how many partitions the Windows operating system needs to work
To create partitions quickly and easily you use the text file as above
With this text file you need to make sure to select the correct hard drive you want to format and partition
As in this example the target hard drive is 1
Make sure you don't select the source hard drive here
I will put the link to download this file in the description of the video
Next, open a command prompt with administrative privileges
You use the diskpart command and browse to the prepared text file to partition the selected hard drive
As you can see the target hard drive will have 3 partitions
The W partition stores the files of the operating system
The S partition helps to boot the operating system
And the last partition is R to restore the operating system when needed
Next you will restore the image file created in the previous step to the W partition of the target hard drive
You need to make sure to enter the correct image file name and select the correct target partition
You will then see operating system files appear in the target partition
However, your Windows operating system will not be able to boot because the S partition is not configured
The above command will create the necessary startup files for the operating system
You select the corresponding operating system partition of the target hard drive for the command
You have completed 2 out of 3 partitions of the target hard drive
The last partition is the recovery partition
By default this partition is hidden and not assigned free characters so I will assign any character to it
As long as the character does not match the characters already used
Here I assign the recovery partition of the source hard drive the character E
In the recovery partition of the destination hard drive, create a new folder called WindowsRE
After getting the new folder you copy the files from partition E to partition R including hidden files
At this point you have done most of the work
Next, turn off the computer and remove the source hard drive to check the results
You go to your computer's BIOS and make sure the computer boots from the new hard drive
After booting you will add a few commands to get the job done
As you can see the Windows operating system boots successfully without you needing to reinstall the operating system
With this method, it will help you clone your hard drive without using any software
In addition, you will better understand what partitions the Windows operating system has and what it is used for
These commands are available on the Windows operating system, you just need to use it correctly
However, your system recovery partition is not working properly if you have not used the following commands
You open the command window and execute the last commands to get the job done
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Good luck