How to clone a hard drive to an SSD for free

What you need

• The SSD. Most PCs with a hard drive take a 2.5-inch SATA SSD. Some also have an M.2 slot. My speed-up guide explains which to buy, and my SSD price tracker has current prices.
• A way to connect it. On a desktop, a spare SATA cable and power connector inside the case. On a laptop, a USB-to-SATA adapter for about $10 to $15 (or a USB enclosure for M.2 drives).
• A USB stick, 4 GB or larger, for the cloning tool. Anything on it will be erased.
• A small screwdriver and about an hour.

Before you clone

1. Back up your personal files to an external drive. Cloning only reads the old drive, but it's easy to pick the wrong drive in step 5 below. My backup guide takes about 20 minutes.
2. Check the old drive's health with the free CrystalDiskInfo. If it says Caution or Bad, clone soon and expect it to take longer.
3. Clean it up. Empty the Recycle Bin, run Disk Cleanup with Clean up system files, and uninstall programs you don't use. Less data means a faster clone.
4. Suspend BitLocker if it's on. Search the Start menu for Manage BitLocker and click Suspend protection. If you don't see BitLocker or Device encryption, you can skip this.
5. Check the sizes. In File Explorer, look at how much of C: is used. If it's less than the SSD's size, you're fine. If the SSD is smaller than the old drive, read cloning to a smaller SSD first.

Free cloning tools that still work in 2026

Macrium Reflect Free, which a lot of older guides recommend, has been discontinued. And many "free" cloning programs make you pay once you try to clone the drive Windows is on. These are the ones that are actually free:

If your SSD came with a migration tool, use it. It runs inside Windows and walks you through everything. Otherwise, use Rescuezilla.

Clone with Rescuezilla, step by step

1. Make the USB stick. Download the Rescuezilla ISO file from rescuezilla.com and the free balenaEtcher or Rufus. Use either one to write the ISO to your USB stick.
2. Connect the SSD with the USB adapter, or inside a desktop. If Windows asks to initialize it, you can ignore that. The clone will overwrite it anyway.
3. Boot from the USB stick. Restart and tap the boot menu key as the PC starts: usually F12 (Lenovo and Dell), F9 (HP), or Esc. Pick the USB stick. If it won't boot, turn off Secure Boot in the BIOS for now and turn it back on afterward.
4. Choose Clone from Rescuezilla's main screen.
5. Pick the source: your old hard drive. Go by size and model name, not the order in the list. Then pick the destination: the new SSD. Double-check this step. Whatever you pick as the destination gets erased.
6. Leave all partitions selected and let it run. When it finishes, shut down.

Cloning to a smaller SSD

This is common when replacing a 1 TB hard drive with a 500 GB SSD. It works as long as the data fits. The problem is that most cloning tools copy partitions at their full size, and a 1 TB partition won't fit on a 500 GB drive even if it's mostly empty. So you shrink it first:

1. Get the used space on C: comfortably below the SSD's size. Move big folders like videos or old phone backups to an external drive.
2. Right-click the Start button and open Disk Management.
3. Right-click the C: partition and choose Shrink Volume. Shrink it enough that all the partitions on that disk add up to less than the SSD's size. Leave 10 to 20 GB of room to spare.
4. If Windows won't shrink it as much as you need, turn off hibernation (run powercfg /h off as administrator), restart, and try again. You can turn it back on later with powercfg /h on.
5. Clone as above. Afterward, open Disk Management on the new SSD, right-click C:, and choose Extend Volume to use the leftover space.

Clonezilla can also clone to a smaller drive without shrinking first. In its Expert mode, the -icds option skips the size check and -k1 resizes the partitions to fit. It only works if the data fits, and the menus are less forgiving, so shrinking first is the safer route for most people.

After the clone

1. Swap the drives. On a laptop, take out the old hard drive and put the SSD in its place. The hardware maintenance manual for your model shows exactly which screws. On a desktop, you can leave the old drive in as extra storage, but disconnect it for the first boot.
2. Boot up. Windows should start normally, and a lot faster.
3. Turn BitLocker back on if you suspended it.
4. Check that TRIM is on. It keeps an SSD fast over time. Open Command Prompt and run fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify. A result of 0 means it's on, which is the default.
5. Keep the old drive for a couple of weeks in case anything's missing. After that, wipe it before you reuse, sell, or recycle it. Here's how to wipe a spare hard drive.

No need to defragment the SSD or install "SSD optimizer" software. Windows handles it.

If it won't boot

• It boots from the old drive instead. Disconnect the old drive, or change the boot order in the BIOS to put the SSD first.
• "No bootable device." The BIOS may be set to the wrong boot mode. If the old drive used UEFI, make sure UEFI is on (and Legacy or CSM off), and vice versa. You can see which the old drive used in Disk Management: an "EFI System Partition" means UEFI.
• A blue screen on first boot (often INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE) usually means the SATA mode changed. In the BIOS, set the SATA mode back to what it was, usually AHCI.
• It asks for a BitLocker recovery key. You'll find it at account.microsoft.com/devices/recoverykey if the PC was signed in with a Microsoft account.

If it still won't boot, put the old drive back in. Nothing on it changed, so you can try the clone again or do a fresh Windows install on the SSD instead.