Best Free Norton Ghost Alternative for Windows 10 or 11

AOMEI Backupper Standard is the best free Norton Ghost alternative, with it, you can ghost hard drive easily in Windows 10 or 11 or from a boot device.

Ivy

by Ivy Updated on October 17, 2022

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About Norton Ghost 

Symantec Norton Ghost (disk utility) is a powerful disk backup and cloning software running in Windows XP (SP2 or later), Vista, and 7 for home and small business users, which has been discontinued on April 30th, 2013, and the support for Norton Ghost ended on June 30th, 2014.

The lasted version is Norton Ghost 15 and its key features like backup and recovery have been built into other Norton products such as the new Norton 360 or Symantec Ghost Solution Suite.

Norton Ghost 15 Trial GUI

What does Norton Ghost 15 (no free version) do in Windows XP, Vista, and 7? The following are the main features provided by Norton Ghost:

  • Backup selected files/folders, or entire hard disk

  • Backup remote computers from your computer

  • Recovering files, folders, or entire drives

  • Clone hard drive

  • Create a Symantec recovery disk or CD

  • Manage backup jobs: Compress, explore, disk image backup

  • Schedule backup

However, Norton Ghost is not available for users, even not to mention available in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, and 11. And many users complained that Norton Ghost 15 backup is very slow. Moreover, you have to pay for Norton Ghost before doing anything. Hence, if you would like to protect your critical data and hard disk safely, it’s time to find another best free Norton Ghost alternative.

What Is the Best Norton Ghost Alternative?

Considering these powerful features in Norton Ghost, it’s strongly recommended to try the best Norton Ghost alternative - AOMEI Backupper Standard. And it has the following advantages: 

  • Fast backup and restore speed.

  •  Flexible backup solutions and features: disk backup, file backup, partition backup, system backup, incremental backup, schedule backup, basic sync.

  • More powerful clone features like disk clone and partition clone.

  • Robust restore options: restore everything, selective file restore, restore to a new location, etc.

  • Easily manage backup tasks: compress, comment, edit, locate, etc.

  • Professional utilities: create bootable media, explore, import/export and check image, view logs, etc.

  • Diverse destination: backup to or from external hard drive, USB drive, network drive or NAS, cloud drive, computer, etc.

And the most important thing is that it’s freeware for you to manage data.

How to Use Norton Ghost Alternative in Windows 10

To get clear on how to use this Norton Ghost alternative in Windows 10, we will show you the detailed steps of cloning system disk in Windows 10.

First of all, please free download AOMEI Backupper Standard and give it a shot. For server users, try AOMEI Backupper Server!

1. Execute Norton Ghost free alternative - AOMEI Backupper Standard, select Clone -> Disk Clone on the main console.

Disk Clone

2. Choose Windows 10 system disk as the source disk to clone, and hit Next >>.

Select Source Disk

3. Tap another larger HDD or SSD as the destination disk to save all the files from Windows 10 hard disk, and press Next >> button to go on.

Select Destination Disk

☪Tips:
✍The destination disk will be deleted or overwritten after the clone is finished.
✍You are able to clone larger hard drive to smaller as long as the data capacity on the source disk is smaller than the destination disk.

4. Press Start Clone >> to clone hard drive in Windows 10 with the free Norton Ghost alternative.

Start Clone

☪Tips:
SSD Alignment: Check this option if the destination disk is a solid-state drive (SSD) to optimize for your SSD.
Sector by sector clone: clone all the sectors on the source disk whether it is used or not, even bad sectors.
Edit partitions: It’s a premium feature to adjust partitions on the destination disk while cloning a smaller drive to a larger drive. And it still supports cloning MBR to GPT and converting disk types, and vice versa.

After the cloning is finished, replace the hard drive with the larger one safely and change boot order to boot from the cloned drive, or keep it safe as an alternative backup.

However, sometimes, you may encounter the cloned SSD won’t boot or Winload.efi missing after clone, please check if the boot mode (Legacy BIOS for MBR and UEFI for GPT) is correct first. If it is still not working, try the following two methods.

#1: Run startup repair in the recovery environment.

#2: Use the bootrec command to fix MBR and rebuild BCD.

For detailed steps, please see: cloned SSD won't boot Windows 10

To Sum Up

As the best free Norton Ghost alternative - AOMEI Backupper Standard, it integrates backup, restore, sync, clone, and powerful tools. Thanks to its user-friendly GUI, all users can do these operations easily in just a few clicks.

And in advanced editions, you still can enjoy more powerful features, like migrate Windows 10 system to SSD, command line tool, restore to dissimilar hardware,  real-time file sync, differential backup, etc. To backup remote computers centrally, try AOMEI Centralized Backupper.

Ivy
Ivy · Editor
Ivy is an editor of AOMEI Technology, she covers backup & restore,hard disk & partitions management and cloud files transfer and so on for AOMEI. She is an outgoing girl and enjoys helping people find solutions to their problems. She loves traveling, eating, reading and so on. She usually hangs out with friends at her leisure time.