How to Clone Windows to External Hard Drive (Bootable)

Can I clone a hard drive with Windows 10 on it?

After a long time of use, your disk is old and fragile, you may encounter many problems, such as:

• your disk not having sufficient space, 
• your computer running slowly or stopping responding from time to time, etc.

Thus, you may want to clone Windows to external hard drive to replace or upgrade old disk for more space or better performance. You don't need to reinstall Windows & programs. Or use it as a backup copy in case of system or disk issues.

To make it, you need a reliable disk cloning software. 

What's the best software to clone Windows?

AOMEI Backupper Professional is worth trying if you want to copy Windows to external hard drive. It will inlude the operating system, customized settings, installed programs, personal data, etc., and make the cloned drive bootable. It applies to all Windows PC systems, including Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8, 7, XP, and Vista.

How to clone Windows to external hard drive step by step

Here take copy Windows 10 to external hard drive to show you the cloning steps. Before start, please get the following things prepared:

By default, this software uses the Intelligent Clone feature to clone a hard drive. So it will be OK if the target disk is smaller. Just follow the steps below to learn how to copy Windows 10 to external hard drive. It also applies to Windows 11, 8, and 7.

Step 1. Select a cloning method. 

Open this utility, and select “Clone” and “Disk Clone” on the main page. To clone only OS, please click “System Clone” instead.

Step 2. Select the source disk.

It will display all available disks in the following window.  Select the disk containing Windows 10 as source disk and click “Next”.

Step 3. Select the destination disk. 

Select the external hard drive you prepare and click “Next”.

Click “OK” to continue this operation if you have already created a backup for your important data. If not, click "Cancel" and backup files to external hard drive first.

Step 4. Set your cloning settings.

Tick "SSD Alignment" if the external hard drive is an SSD. Click "Edit Partitions" and select "Add unused space to all partitions" and "Manually adjust partition size" to ensure your disk shows full capacity. 

You can choose one of the two, depending on whether you want to extend unallocated space to all partitions or a specific one. 

Step 5. Start cloning Windows. 

Finally, confirm the cloning settings and click “Start Clone” to clone computer to external hard drive.

After cloning Windows to external hard drive, you still need to check if the cloned drive is bootable with the following steps: 

• Open the drive bay. Shutdown your computer, plug out all power, remove the hard drive bay cover with a screwdriver.
• Take out the original hard drive. Unscrew the screws holding the hard drive, then take out the existing hard drive at an angle(eg: 30 or 45 degrees).

• Installed the external hard drive back into your computer.
• Change boot order after replacing hard drive and boot from it. 

Turn on your computer, hit the specific key in the initial screen (usually F2 or ESC) to access BIOS, go to the boot tab and use “+” to move the external drive to the first option, then press “F10” to save the change and boot from the cloned drive.

Written in the end

With the help of the best cloning software - AOMEI Backupper,  you can easily clone Windows to external hard drive, even with different sizes or disk partition style. In addition, it can fix unallocated space left after cloning and further improve SSD disk performance.

Besides, this utility still provides users with many useful features. Thus, you can use it to create system backup, incremental backup, dissimilar hardware restore, create bootable USB, mirror folder to network drive, etc. Why not give it a try right now?

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