Easy & Safe: How to Use Hirens to Clone Disk

What is Hirens Boot CD?

Hiren's Boot CD is a powerful tool for computer technicians and IT professionals to diagnose and repair computer systems. It is a bootable CD that contains a set of software tools and utilities. These tools are divided into many categories such as partitioning tools, backup, cloning and recovery tools.

When you encounter hard disk failure, virus infection, partition, password recovery and data recovery, you will need these tools to troubleshoot and repair various computer problems. It is a great tool for cloning disks because it allows users to quickly and easily create an exact copy of their hard drive or other storage devices.

How to Use Hirens to Clone Disk

After knowing what is Hirens Boot CD, you can continue to read this article to learn how to use Hirens Boot CD to clone a disk. Each section has detailed steps. You can scroll down for more details.

Step 1. Create Hirens bootable USB

In order to use Hirens Boot CD PE, you must first download the ISO file. Once the disk file is burned to a disk, it can be used to boot the computer. After the computer has been started from the disk, you can use the built-in utility to clone the disk. In the following section, I will provide a step-by-step guide on how to clone a disk using Hirens Boot CD PE.

1. You can download the Hirens Boot CD from its official website. After downloading the ISO file, you can use Windows' built-in Windows Disc Image Burner to copy the information from the ISO to a CD/DVD/USB drive. (Since many computers have no CD/DVD drive, here is an example of burning to USB)

2. To burn an ISO to USB, you should download Rufus, a simple and free tool for creating a bootable USB drive. After that, insert the USB device and run Rufus. This operation will erase all data on the USB, please back it up in advance.

3. After running the app, select FAT32(default) for the file system.

4. Navigate to Format Options, then change the option next to Create a bootable disk using ISO Image.

5. Select the little CD icon next to this box and browse to the location of the ISO file in the HBCD folder.

6. Finally, click Start when ready.

7. When the process completes, you've installed HBCD on your USB.

Step 2. Set USB as boot drive

Now that you have installed the HBCD on the USB, we now need to let the USB boot the computer. The specific operations are as follows.

1. When the computer shows the boot screen, press the "Esc" key to enter the BIOS settings; (some computers may be Delete, F2, F6 or F12).

2. After entering the BIOS, set USB as the first boot drive.

3. After setting, press the "ESC" key to return to the main BIOS interface and select Save and Exit.

4. Restart the computer, and the computer will automatically enter the main interface of USB boot.

Step 3. Use Hirens to Clone Disk

After that, you can boot into the main interface of Hirens Boot CD.

1. Open the "utilities" in the Hirens Boot CD, find "Partition Tools" in the "Hard disk tools", and then you will see a tool called AOMEI Partition Assistant 7.0. Open this tool, you can see this interface.

2. In the "Wizards" in the upper left corner of the main interface, select a "Disk Copy Wizard", and then follow the steps to continue.

The Best Hirens Alternative for Cloning Disk

From the above steps, you can easily see that it is very troublesome to use Hirens to clone a disk. There are complex steps you need to master and several apps to download. If you want to find a simpler and more efficient method, you can use the best Hirens replacement software - AOMEI Backupper Professional.

It supports Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8.1/8, Windows 7, Vista and XP. By using this professional disk cloning software, you can avoid the tedious steps of copying the ISO file to the bootable USB after downloading the Hirens Boot CD.

• Secure boot: After cloning, you can boot your PC from the cloned disk directly and successfully.
• Intelligent clone: By default, it uses the Intelligent clone feature. Only used sectors on the disk will be cloned. So you can easily clone a large disk to a small one.
• Sector by sector clone: If your target disk is equal or larger than the source disk, you can use this function to clone all sectors whether used or not. This way no hidden sectors are missed.

The cloning process will erase all data on the target disk. If you have important files on the target disk, remember to backup files to an external disk first. If you are a Windows Server user, you can choose AOMEI Backupper Server.

Step 1. Download AOMEI Backupper Professional, install and open it. Click Clone > Disk Clone. 

Note:

Professional edition supports cloning both data disks and systems disks from MBR to MBR/MBR to GPT, or GPT to  GPT/GPT to MBR. If you only want to clone data disks, you can pick the complete free Standard edition.

Step 2. Choose your old HDD as the source disk.

Step 3. Choose the other disk as the destination disk.

Step 4. Confirm your operations and click Start Clone. 

Note:

• SSD Alignment: If your target disk is an SSD, remember to tick SSD Alignment to make the disk’s reading and writing speed faster.
• Edit Partitions: You can change the partition size when your target disk is larger than the source disk. 

Summary

This article introduces what is Hirens Boot CD, how to clone hard drive with Hirens Boot CD and its best alternative - AOMEI Backupper Professional. It is a reliable and user-friendly tool that can easily clone disks in just a few simple steps. It supports a wide range of disk types and cloning methods and is compatible with all versions of Windows. What's more, after cloning you can successfully boot your computer from the cloned disk.

In addition, as a professional cloning software, it also provides partition clonie and system clone to meet your different cloning needs. Its backup and restore function can also better protect your data security. You can download this software to explore more.