How to Migrate OS to SSD Without Rebooting?

Can I move OS to another drive without restarting?

Usually, users desire to switch the operating system solely to another drive from the current drive for the enhancement of the operating system and the drive size constraint. Sometimes they want to keep OS separately running with other software on the same drive to protect the data.

Now lots of users prefer to use SSD as the system disk, not HDD because of its better performance and faster read/write speed.

However, most migration tools will ask users to reboot the PC to complete the migration. If you’re running some programs that can’t be interrupted at the same time when you want to migrate OS, it will be a little embarrassed.

So, here is the hot clone. What is hot cloning? What’s the difference compared with the normal clone?

The normal clone is called, cold clone or cold migration. When users move the system to a different computer node, the existing machine will be in downtime. So, it needs the computer reboot to finish the whole procedure. Hot cloning is also called live migration. Via this cloning way, you can keep the OS running, and complete the migration simultaneously.

Thus, with hot cloning, you can move OS to another drive without restarting your PC or interrupting the running programs, which also can help you migrate os to ssd windows 10.

How to transfer OS from HDD to SSD with hot clone?

But, how can you migrate OS to SSD with hot clone? With a normal clone tool, you can’t; With AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can easily do a hot clone to move OS. 

This tool is a practical disk management windows 10 for Windows PC users. All Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP users can choose this tool, and because it can also work well on virtual machine, you can also use it to manage your virtual OS.

What’s more, as a multifunctional tool, you can also clone the whole disk, migrate installed programs, convert disk between MBR and GPT without data loss, convert file system without formatting, and so on.

And if you have a Server machine or you need to manage many computers, there are the Server Edition, the Unlimited Edition and the Tech Edition for different types of users to easily and efficiently manage their devices.

To transfer OS with hot clone, the operation is also quite simple. After you download and run this tool, you can follow the steps here.

Step 1. Connect the target disk to your computer and ensure it can be detected; install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. Then, click "Migrate OS to SSD" and click "Next" to continue.

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

Step 3. In this window, you can resize the partition and modify other information (including location, and drive letter) of the partition on the new disk, of course, you can also keep default settings.

Step 4. A note about how to boot OS from the target disk will show up, keep it in mind and click "Finish" to continue.

Step 5. You’ll back to the main interface where you can preview the result of the operation. To commit it, click “Apply” and “Proceed”.

When the task is over, your OS will be moved to the target drive.

To sum up

After reading this guide, do you know how to migrate OS to SSD without restarting your PC? With hot clone method, users can move OS to a new drive when the system is running. All data on the drive is safe.

As the picture shows, AOMEI Partition Assistant has many helpful utilities. All features have easy operation, so you don’t need to worry about how to manage your PC or fix the glitches of your PC.