How to Migrate OS to SSD with Qiling Disk Master [without Reinstallation]

Brief introduction of SSD & HDD

Before you migrate OS to SSD or HDD, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of SSD and HDD.

HDD - Hard Disk Drive: It is the most basic computer storage device, used to store data. Usually, the local disk containing C, D, and F drives in the computer are all hard disk drives. The capacity of the common disk can be 80G, 160G, 750G, 1TB, or 2TB…. Divided by the volume, there are PATA, SATA, and SCSI…. Among those, PATA is with a large capacity but a low price, so it is suitable for home use. SCSI has a comparatively small capacity and is expensive, but it is with good performance and higher stability, so it is usually applied in a high-tech field.

SSD - Solid State Drive: A kind of hard disk which is made of a solid-state electronic storage chip and consists of the control unit (flash chip) and a storage unit (DRAM - Dynamic Random Access Memory chip). It is the same as a common hard disk in many aspects, like definition, the stipulation of interface, function, usage, appearance, and size. But it runs faster than HDD in reading and writing speed. It is widely used in the military, IT industry, aviation, and many other fields.

Benefits of migrating OS to SSD

If you move Windows to SSD, you can experience faster processing speed in reading and writing, get decreased boot time, and you can boot your computer much faster, avoid the risk of data loss caused by shaking the knocking the drive unintentionally, and enjoy relatively quiet working environment. Or when your current hard drive is almost full, you can move OS to a larger drive. All in all, it is easy to get the motivation to perform OS migration.

How to migrate OS from HDD to SSD easily and safely without reinstallation

Then, how to migrate only OS to SSD or HDD successfully? You can employ Qiling Disk Master Professional, which brings a function named "Migrate OS to SSD", specially designed for users who want to quickly move system to HDD or SSD but don’t want to reinstall OS. It also supports migrating OS from MBR/GPT to MBR/GPT. What's more, the hot clone technique allows users to run OS during the OS migration.

Now, please download the Demo version to see how it works:

• Free Download
• Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, 100% Secure

Prerequisites for OS Migration

• Connect a drive HDD/SSD with enough space as the destination drive to keep migrated OS partitions. During migration, you can either connect the destination drive internally or externally via USB connector during disk clone.
• Download and install Qiling Disk Master on the computer where you would like to migrate the OS.

It is a paid feature to migrate a current running system to HDD or SSD. Please upgrade to Qiling Disk Master Professional, Server, or above versions to use the feature.

How to Migrate OS to SSD in Partition Assistant

1. Connect the SSD to your computer and ensure it can be detected; Install and launch Qiling Disk Master Professional. Click the "Tools and utilities" main tab and select "System clone".

2. The Migrate OS to SSD wizard will run. This wizard helps you migrate your current OS to SSD or HDD. Please click "Next" to continue.

3. Choose an unallocated space on your SSD as the target location. If there is no unallocated space, you can check "I want to delete all partitions on the disk 2 to migrate system to the disk" and then click "Next".

Tips:

• The program will detect and list system partitions as source automatically so you can directly an unallocated space on the listed destination drive as the destination location.
• In some cases, your system and boot partitions are located on different drives. In this case, the drive with the boot partition will not be listed to select as the destination location.

4. In this window, you could resize partition and modify other information (including location, and drive letter) of the partition on new disk, of course, you can also keep default settings.

5. You'll be back to the main interface where you can see the pending operations and preview the result of operation. To commit it, please click "Proceed" and the OS migration operation will start.

6. A note about how to boot OS from SSD or HDD will show up, keep it in mind and click "OK" to continue.

7. Once the migration is finished successfully, the PC will be restarted automatically. Then, you can follow the process to boot your PC from the new SSD.

Conclusion

The OS migration has been finished successfully followed by the above steps. In this way, you can connect the destination drive internally to your computer and boot from it.

The "Migrate OS to SSD" wizard is mainly used in the following situations:

If the system boots slowly from the original HDD, you can use the tool to migrate OS to a larger HDD or SSD to get a faster system boot speed so that you will get better computer performances.

If the original system drive is too old and it is time to exchange, you can use the tool to migrate it and replace with a newer HDD or SSD.

If your original system drive is with insufficient free space, you can use the wizard to migrate OS to a larger HDD or SSD to replace it so that you will get enough drive space.

How to Boot from the SSD

After you clone OS to SSD disk, to successfully boot from it, you need to connect the SSD internaly to your computer, not through external connector, for example, USB connector.

And, you must change the boot disk to the SSD in BIOS. Please restart your computer, enter the BIOS setup, change the boot order, set the SSD as the first boot device, and boot the computer from there.

Notes:
● Before transferring OS from MBR to GPT disk, please confirm that your motherboard supports EFI/UEFI boot.
● To clone all partitions (hidden partitions and data partitions included) to another hard drive, you can use the Disk Clone Wizard.
● After the OS successfully boots from the SSD, you can wipe the HDD to use it as a data disk.

FAQs:

Q: Why the drive I would like to migrate to is not listed?

A: The might reason is that your system partition and boot partition are located on different physical drives so both drives are taken as your source system drive.

Q: After migrating OS, will the source system be deleted or not bootable?

A: Migrating system won’t take any effect on source system so you can still boot from the source system drive.

Q: Can I manually delete or wipe the original OS drive as a data drive to make full use of the drive space?

A: Once the OS migration is finished and your PC boots from the new drive without any problem, you can delete it as a data drive.