Create A Bootable Clone of your Windows 10 Drive

today I'm gonna be talking about the process of cloning your C Drive your boot drive on Windows 10 - a different hard disk or SSD especially if you're doing into a larger disk which is what I need to do today so if we look in the window here you'll see that I have a C Drive that is 250 gigs actually formatted it's only 232 gigs and I'm constantly running out of space but inside the machine I had an extra SATA cable available so I plugged in a new SSD that's 500 gigs and so what I want to do is clone the C to the e and I want to restart and make this Drive my boot drive and so that's the process we're gonna work through there are a lot of different software packages you can use to do this but for me the most important thing was I wanted something that not only would do the job but was free because this is not something I plan to do a lot I don't think I'll even need to use this program anytime again real soon so I don't want to pay thirty forty dollars for something I would just use once so what I found was a program called Mac reom reflect and they do have a free version which is called that which is the home used version and if you scroll down here the one thing that's important that I was looking for is this direct disk cloning and you'll see that it is in the free version so that well it does have a lot of other really great features none of those are really important to me at this point I just want this one option and so I downloaded it I already have it installed and that's we're gonna walk through right now so I'm gonna launch this and when it first appears it shows you all of your current drives so right here is my C Drive and you'll see there's multiple partitions I have another drive here this is the new one which has a couple invisible partitions and one very large one that's empty and then I have two extra disks disks that I use for other things that there aren't boot drives are just extra data drives and so we're gonna start by clicking on this first drive here and we're going to choose the option to clone and remember at this point it's a good idea just to slow down and make sure everything you do at this point is what you mean to do because the last thing you want to do is clone one drive over another drive that you had not intended to replace and so I know this is the right one because it's my C Drive it says right here C Drive and also because it's the only Samsung I have in there that is 250 gigs so I'm going to select that and then choose clone so by default it already filled out the source and now I need to select the destination disk what do I want to clone it to and so here I'm gonna choose disk 2 because it is also a Samsung but it's a 500 gig and I know I only have one of those in there so I'm gonna click on that and the first thing to do is to remove the current partitions and so I'm just going to hit delete existing partitions and I'll click on each one and then delete it so now I have the full drive available to me and the basic idea is to move each of these partitions down and we want to expand this middle one and the first thing I tried to do was move each one down like this and then there's this big chunk at the end and I wanted to add it to this obviously but because the partitions are not next to each other and because you can't really reorder them that didn't work very well there wasn't any any way for me to join this to this so let's undo that okay and we're gonna start again I'm going to drag it down and you'll see the size stays the same two hundred Meg's two hundred Meg's the relative size of these boxes is not accurate it's it's more of a reference than anything we're gonna drag this one down yeah when it's currently to 132 gigs but I really need to do is combine it with this here but leave just enough room for this last one so this last one is 509 minutes so that's an important number to keep in mind so we're going to click on this one and we're going to click on properties and what we need to do and right here you'll see we can kind of expand now into that empty space well what we're gonna do to be a little more accurate is we're going to choose megabytes and we're going to say we want to take everything except 509 Meg's because that's all we need to leave available for the last partition okay so that means the main partition will go up to 465 gigs and it will leave just enough for the last partition so I hit OK and again these are not to size because clearly 465 is much larger than 232 but they're exactly the same size and I'm gonna grab this last one and drop it in to the 509 so now the first and last partition match and the middle one is what's going to be expanded so I'm gonna click finish and we're not gonna save this as an XML because we don't know I'm not going to do this again later I just want to run it now so I'm gonna hit OK it's just giving me a warning it's gonna be overwritten because it did find some partitions and I'm gonna click here say continue and it's important to point out that while you're doing this process it's a good idea not to be running a whole bunch of other apps at the same time or downloading email or browsing the web because the idea is you want to copy the C Drive over and not have a lot of activity going on at the same time for one it may make it more difficult to get an exact clone but to it's also going to slow down the process if you're doing multiple things at the same time so I'm gonna let this run it should take about 20 minutes maybe a little less you and and then I'll jump back in okay looks like it has completed so let's close this out and a quick glance in the window you can see I still have my C Drive but now I have another boot drive and it looks like it also copied over the name so let's fix that in a second so I have my C Drive I have a couple other drives that were just my data drives now I have this new larger boot drive but let's rename it just to make sure they're distinguishable [Music] alright so what I need to do now is reboot to my 500 gig drive and just confirm that everything is working correctly okay so I rebooted the computer I entered the BIOS screen and selected my new drive as my boot drive and right away it came up and as you can see here my 500 gig is now the C Drive and the old 250 is now an extra Drive and so what I'll probably do is run this for a week or two just make sure there's no issues and then I'll just reformat and reuse the other SSD but all in all it's going through the process took about 20 minutes and everything seems to be working fine so hopefully if this is something you need to do you found this tutorial helpful

Channel: cre8ting tech

Views: 276,931

Keywords: Windows 10, Disk Clone, Boot Drive Clone, Expand Boot Drive Size, Clone to New SSD, Backup Boot Drive, Macrium, Macrium Reflect, Macrium Reflect 7, Macrium Reflect Free, SSD Upgrade, Boot Drive Upgrade

Id: O5XWAQD0r_s

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 25 2019