How to Clone a Hard Drive (Windows 10)

Well I decided I was do this tutorial cause I'm sure a lot of people find this hard to do.  Its a rather simple tutorial and should have you on your way to recovering your broken Windows hard drive unless of course its completely broke.

Now what I recommend is a program called AOMEI Backupper which is available for free.  There is a paid version but one of the features that maybe useless to you is what you pay for.  Its a system clone which means you can clone your Windows system without all that other data so its like basically have a fully clean Windows OS.  Instead we will be using Disk Clone which clones the Windows system and data over.

You can grab the free or paid version here:
http://www.backup-utility.com/free-backup-software.html

Now go ahead and install the software and then open it up.

Now comes the steps on cloning your broken Windows hard drive to a new hard drive.

The first thing your going to want to do is click on the clone tab on the left side and click disk clone.  Which will copy over the system (Windows) plus the data.

Alright so now we want to select the drive you want to clone from which will be your source hard drive.  For me it will be the C: drive which should be yours as well it might be a different letter.  Just remember that there is two partitions and if not maybe more depending on the version of Windows your using.

Now we want to select the destination for the source system and data to go to.  Remember I would recommend to have a fully formatted hard drive cause your going to want to remove that broken piece of junk for this new hard drive.  I don't have a image for this one but it should be self explanatory.  

Okay so on the next screen you have options on how you want to do these clones.  You can choose the layout for the partition on the destination drive if you want to do it that way.  For me choosing manually made a messy clone that didn't perform properly and I had bad performance.  Not sure what happened but after the first mess up I decided to choose the option sector by sector and then after I was finished I booted the OS from the cloned destined drive and manually extended to use my whole drive.  The clone performed well and works perfectly.

There is another option that I would recommend selected if you have a SSD so select it if you have one.  I am not sure if this is required and don't know how well it'll work but I recommend this as it may be dependent on how well the drive will perform after the copy.  If you don't have an SSD then don't click it.

Screenshot courtesy of: AOMEI (https://goo.gl/N1UOSe)

Then start your clone and your ready to go.  This should take a little while depending on the size of the source.

After your done get in your PC remove the broken hard drive and replace it with the new hard drive.  Make sure to go to your bios and change your boot settings to match your new hard drive so it'll boot straight to Windows.

If Windows has booted the clone then the process should have worked and quite possibly the performance should work great as well.

Next lets go to disk management to extend the data partition of your C: drive.  Just right click on the partition which is where all the data should be and press extend.  Now of course your probably wanting to use the full drive but if you aren't you can select the amount of space you want to extend so select your numbers wisely.  Other then that if you ready to go and use that full drive just click next and your whole drive should be used.

Sorry I have no screenshots for this part if you need any help just search Google on "how to extend a hard drive".

Now you should be able to use your computer like you previously did with that broken drive without the worries that your hard drive is on the way out.

If this tutorial didn't work out for you I highly suggest you use AOMEI's support site.  It'll have all the information there for you.  http://www.backup-utility.com/features/system-clone.html