How to clone a Windows 11 system disk for free

This guide walks you through the steps to clone the system disk (or any other disk) of a Windows 11 PC for free. The method should also work on devices running older versions of Windows.

I bought a new Windows 11 PC this week for Office work and noticed the solid state drive was slowing things down. It had a good amount of space, 512 Gigabytes, but as soon as the write processes started, it slowed down the entire system considerably.

I still had a nice 256 Gigabyte solid state drive from an old PC and decided to replace the slow SSD from the new PC with the fast SSD from the old one. Cloning copies all data from one drive to another. Since I didn’t want to reinstall Windows or applications, I decided to clone the drive, as this would speed things up significantly.

While there are many cloning guides available on the internet, most seem to advertise paid products. This guide uses free disk backup software, Macrium Reflect Free to be precise, to clone system partition from slow SSD to fast SSD.

The first thing you should do is download Macrium Reflect Free. You can do this from the developer’s website, but you need to provide an email address to do so. You can also download the software from third party sites, such as Softonic.

NoteNote: You may want to decrypt an encrypted partition before starting the process as the encryption software may not work properly due to disk change.

Installation should not be a problem. One thing you need to do is to connect both hard drives to the PC as it will copy the data from the running system drive to the new drive.

Macrium Reflect Free shows all the disks and their partitions in its interface. Select “clone this disk”, which you will find under the main system disk in the interface.

The clone window opens and the primary disk is displayed at the top as the source disk. Turn on “select a disk to clone” to choose the destination drive.

Use the “delete partition” action to remove any existing partitions from the second drive. Since you want to copy the system disk, you need to make sure that the entire disk is free.

Once done, select the copy partitions button and then “exact partition offset and length” from the selection menu.

You should see an exact copy of the disk structure after selection. Keep in mind that you need enough space on the new disk to be able to copy all the data that is on the source disk. The two disks do not need the same amount of space, but there must be enough free space available.

Select Next to continue and then Next again to skip the programming part. Since this is a one-time operation, there is no need to schedule the task so that it can run again in the future.

Macrium Reflect Free displays an overview on the final screen. There you will find information about the clone and each of the partitions that the backup application will copy to the new drive in the process.

Select the Finish button to complete the setup. Macrium Reflect Free displays a “what do you want to do now” message below. Simply select “ok” on the screen to start cloning right away. You can also select cancel to postpone it.

The program warns you that all data on the destination disk will be overwritten in the process. You must close all other programs now and save all work before continuing.

You have another option to cancel the process. Check the box “All data on the destination volume will be overwritten. Confirm to continue” and select continue to start the process.

The duration of the process depends on a number of factors, such as the performance of the source and destination drives, and the amount of data that needs to be copied.

You get a clone complete message at the end if everything processed without any major issues.

Once this is done, all that remains is to shut down the Windows PC, remove the old drive and replace it with the new one. The PC should boot from that drive and Windows 11 should start as before if all went well.

Now you: Have you cloned disks before? How did you do it?

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