How to Clone Your OS Hard Drive Using the Free NIUBI Partition Editor

Are you upgrading to a larger hard drive or a new SSD? In this tutorial, we show you how to clone your Windows system drive for free using NIUBI Partition Editor. While many cloning tools require a paid license for system migration, NIUBI's free edition allows you to create a bootable copy of your OS, programs, and data.

Here is a writeup of the NIUBI disk cloning process on our website.
https://onlinecomputertips.com/support-categories/hardware/clone-os-hard-drive/

We walk you through a live demonstration, starting with initializing a new disk in Disk Management and then using the Clone Disk Wizard to move everything over. We also address a common issue where recovery partitions can block you from extending your new drive, and show you how to use NIUBI to rearrange partitions so you can utilize your full disk capacity. Whether you're a beginner or a power user, this step-by-step guide makes disk cloning simple and reliable.

Check out our playlist of other powerful hard drive cloning tools.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwdwMLbf_qdYtCnCQyoavA2WBZnD5aYM4

0:00 - Introduction: Cloning with NIUBI Free Edition
0:45 - Initializing the New Disk in Disk Management
1:15 - Opening NIUBI and Starting the Clone Disk Wizard
1:40 - Selecting Source and Destination Disks
2:50 - Applying Changes and Running the Clone Process
3:35 - Boot Test: Verifying the Cloned Drive
4:07 - Fixing Unallocated Space: Moving Partitions
5:45 - Extending the C: Drive to Full Capacity

We tried the migration option and ended up with extra partitions that were assigned drive letters. We were able to remove all of the drive letters except for the one on the EFI partition. You can check out the difference between a clone and a migration by watching the migration video here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyze37TIDos

Here is a link to the software download.
https://www.hdd-tool.com/partition-manager/partition-editor-free.html

Here is a link to a video for software that will allow you to rearrange your hard drive partitions so you can extend your new drive to use all of the space if you run into that problem when cloning to a larger drive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWtaNbx6nJ0

Step-by-Step Instructions:

1 - Initialize Your New Drive: Connect your new hard drive or SSD. Right-click the Start button, select Disk Management, and initialize the new disk (GPT is recommended for modern systems). Leave the space as "Unallocated."
2 - Launch NIUBI Partition Editor: Open the software and locate your current system disk (usually Disk 0) and your new target disk.
3 - Run the Clone Wizard: Click on Clone Disk Wizard in the left panel.
* Select your current system drive as the Source Disk.
* Select the new, unallocated drive as the Destination Disk.
* Confirm that all data on the destination will be erased.
4 - Apply the Clone: Review the layout and click Apply in the top-left corner. Ensure all other applications are closed before proceeding. The software will lock the volumes and begin the copy process.
5 - Physical Swap and Boot: Once complete, shut down your PC. Disconnect the old drive and connect the new one to the primary SATA or M.2 port. Power on your computer to verify it boots into Windows correctly.
6 - Maximize Your Storage: If your new drive is larger than the old one, you may have unallocated space blocked by a recovery partition.
* Open NIUBI again.
* Right-click the partition that is "in the way" and select Resize/Move Volume.
* Drag the partition block to the end of the disk.
* Click OK and Apply.
7 - Extend the C: Drive: You can now go back to Disk Management, right-click your C: drive, and select Extend Volume to use the remaining unallocated space.

🎓 Step up your skills with our online training courses:
http://madeeasytraining.com

📘 Get our book "Windows 11 Made Easy" on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HFXWXRY

🚀 Master your software and hardware with our latest tech tips:
https://onlinecomputertips.com

#WindowsTips #DiskCloning #SSDUpgrade #HardDrive #SystemMigration #OnlineComputerTips

---

Closed Caption:

[Music]
in this video we're going to show you
how to clone your hard drive using the
free nyubi partition editor they have a
free version and pay for version but the
free version allows you to clone your
drive so we're going to try this on the
windows system drive and see if it will
boot
we did another video on how to migrate
your operating system using nyubi and
actually worked very well except we
ended up with some extra drive letters
that it took from like the system
partition and that kind of thing efi
partition so i'll put a link in that
video so you can see how that worked
all right so we have this computer here
it's a virtual machine
so i just added another hard drive to it
so let's open up the usual disk
management and see uh
what it looks like
okay so
as you open it up it's plugged in but it
was never initialized so we're gonna
have to initialize it we use gpt
and now it's
got
100 gigabytes of unallocated space so
we're not going to do anything we're not
going to make a volume
we're just going to leave it unallocated
so now we're going to open up nyubi
okay so you see we've got the same thing
here's our windows drive
so what happened on the other video is
it copied these partitions and gave them
drive letters and i was able to remove
the drive layers except for the uh
one of the efi partition
which is okay if you have that extra
driver it still worked fine but you just
had to deal with having that small
little partition with the drive letter
so i'm not sure if that's a deal breaker
or not
all right so we have disk zero this
windows drive and here's the
new one we're just talking about
so we're gonna do the clone disk wizard
okay so the source disk is this 81 80
gig drive
and here's the map of the drive like we
just saw
and the destination is going to be 100
gig drive
unallocated space here click on next
and then you have this option here to
delete all partitions on the disk which
is going to need to do so make sure it's
blank and you don't have anything else
on there because it's going to be
wiped out
okay so we'll click the c drive
partition and next
now you get this message if you want to
boot the system from the target disk
please make sure that it's set to boot
from the new disk and bios after cloning
so what i'll do is
once we clone it i'm going to remove the
old drive and just have it boot off the
new drive and we'll see if it boots
so it's got to lock the volume so make
sure you don't have anything open like
file explorer
okay so it kind of shows you the mapping
here
so what you need to do now
is click on apply because it's not going
to do anything until you click apply
and it says close all of the
applications blah blah blah
click ok so now it's going to run
through this process which takes quite a
bit of time so i'll pause the video and
then i'll be back after that
all right so everything's done
uh so everything looks about the same
here so we got the
80 gig main partition here
this was a this was an 88 total this was
100 gig total i believe so now we have
20 gigs unallocated so it looks like it
just took the 80 and left the 20
unallocated
okay so now what i'm going to do is i'm
going to shut it down remove this
original hard drive and then make this
one the main hard drive so this is a
virtual machine so it's pretty simple to
do but if this is your physical computer
you you know disconnect this one and
just plug this one in so this would be
the main drive and let's see if it boots
up so we'll be right back
okay so got a windows logo so that's a
good sign
all right i've got a login screen so
let's log in and see what we get
all right let's open up file explorer
see we got here
all right pc
c drive no other weird drive letters
like we got when we did the migrate
option
so this looks like the clone might have
been the way to go rather than the
migrate
so if we open that up here let's see
what the properties say
yep so 80 gigs let's take a look at a
let's look at a
disk management
here we got that 20 gigs unallocated
space so like i said it took the
80 from the original drive and then we
could what we could do we could just do
this
actually see this is a problem too
or if you want to extend this volume we
have this 495 megabyte
uh
partition in the way so that's blocking
this one so to speak but fortunately the
nyubi could have fixed that too we
actually did a video on how to do that
okay so if we do the resize move
we should be able to
move that over to the end there so now
this is uh
next to it so click ok
and apply it
okay so now let's actually do this from
disk management just to prove it works
here so now this is next to this
so we got the 20 gigs unallocated next
to our original volume here so let's
now we can extend the volume
so now we got the whole hundred gigs so
that's another cool thing that this
nyubi will do is they'll let you
rearrange your partitions so you could
do what you need to do for extending
volumes and that kind of thing
all right so that was a success so i
will put a link to the software in the
description you could download it and
try it yourself and start cloning your
hard drives alright thanks for watching
and be sure to subscribe
[Music]