Need to clone an old computer to a new one?

As computers become slower and technology improved, it’s quite normal to replace your old computer with a newer fast one. What can you do if you want to use the old systems settings, applications, and data on your new computer?

Instead of wasting time installing Windows, applications and files that you have accumulated on the old system, you can choose to clone the old drive to your new system. This way, your newer faster computer contains all of your personal data and programs so you can continue to use it without setting preferences from scratch.  

Problem with transferring operating system from one computer to another computer

Speaking of transferring operating system from one computer to another, many users may feel disappointed. That’s because you may encounter device drivers compatility issues and license problem. Now, let’ have a closer look at it.

Device drivers incompatibility: After cloning to another computer, your computer may not boot with errors like “hardware abstraction layer” or “hal.dll”, even blue screen. Every computer has its own specific drivers fit for the motherboard and chipset. Among these drivers, the storage controller drivers help motherboard to comunicate with hard disk. In a short word, the new computer does not know how to handle the hardware if it has incompatibility drivers, the result is boot failure.

Reactivation issues: This can be a headache if your computer is a OEM copy, because it’s tied to the first computer with installed operating system. If your license is Retail or Volume, reactivation is much simple, because they can be used on any computer, but only on one computer. When connected to the internet, Windows will automatically activate your computer. If not, you can manually type your licence key to reactivate your system.

Software to clone one computer to another computer

If you want to transfer one computer to another one, there are two available ways you can use – Disk Clone or System Clone, Backup and Restore. 

First, If you clone the disk, the cloning process will also include all of the hardware information of the original drive. If the new computer has the same hardware or at a minimum the same CPU, then you will be able to boot the new system from the cloned drive without any extra steps.

  • You can clone the hard drive in the old computer, and then install the cloned drive into your new computer. 
  • If you’d prefer to only keep Windows OS and your programs you can use the ‘System Clone’ function to only clone your OS and applications to your new computer.

Second, if your new computer does not have the same hardware as old one, you may encounter cloned hard drive won’t boot issue. In this case, you can use “Universal Restore” feature of a professional backup and restore software to ensure secure boot.

Here, I highly recommend you the specialist hard drive cloning & backup and restore software – AOMEI Backupper Professional Edition – allows you to easily clone a computer to another computer whether using the same hardware or not. 

Other things you need to prepare for cloning old computer 

In addition to a specialist software, you still need to check or prepare other things. Continue to see below and learn more.

For laptop, check if has removable back panel and the number of its drive bay. Getting access to hard drive is the first element of replacing hard drive. If not, the follow-up work will not continue. Also, if your laptop only have one drive bay, you need to prepare a USB-to-SATA adapter, dock or encloser for connection.

Check the used space of both hard drives. In general, hard drive clone may fail owing to smaller target disk. But specialist disk clone software can clone larger hard drive to smaller drive as long as the used space on old drive is smaller than or equal to target drive.

Confirm the partition style of both hard drives. If different, GPT to MBR, for example, you need to convert MBR to GPT with disk management, or make the target disk blank.

Keep a copy of system backup or disk backup. If you have done a in-depth research online, you may know there are examples of cloned hard drive won’t boot. To prevent this situation, you need to create a system or disk backup ahead of time.

Method 1: Clone computer to another computer with the same haware

Step 1. Connect the new hard drive to your computer and make sure it can be detected.

Step 2. Open AOMEI Backupper Professional, click the “Disk Clone” option under the Clone tab. To clone only system, select “System Clone” to continue. 

Step 3. Select the source disk on the old computer and click “Next” .

Step 4. Select the destination disk that you connected before and click “Next” to continue.

Step 5. Read the warning message carefully and click “OK” if you are happy to proceed. To protect your data, I recommend you backup your files to an external HDD before continuing. 

Step 6. In the “Operations Summary” window, you can preview the cloning process. If you are happy, click “Start Clone” to begin. 

Method 2: Transfer operating system from one computer to another with different hardware

To transfer the operating system to a new computer with different hardware, you should do the following first:

  • Create a disk image or a system image using AOMEI Backupper Professional Edition. The backup image must be saved somewhere the new computer can access flexibly. AOMEI Backupper supports backing up to NAS, HDD, SSD, and other storage devices.
  • Start up the new computer via a bootable CD or USB created by AOMEI Backupper. If you have multiple computers, you can use PXE Boot Tool, because it allows you to boot multiple client computers within the LAN simultaneously.

Then, use the disk image or system image created before to transfer operating system. These steps apply to move Windows 10 to new computer as well as other opreating system, such as, Windows 8, Windows 7. 

Step 1. Boot the new computer via AOMEI bootable media or the PXE Boot Tool. In the main window of AOMEI Backupper, click on the “Restore” tab.

Step 2. Click “Select Image File” to locate the disk image backup or system image backup you created earlier. Note: the drive letter may have changed under AOMEI PE environment.

Step 3. Click the disk backup image in the list and hit “Next” to continue. 

Step 4. Tick “Restore the entire disk” and then click “Next” to continue. 

Step 5. Select the destination location to restore the image backup and then click “Next”.

Step 6. In the operation summary screen, check the “Universal Restore” option and then click “Start Restore“.