As you likely know, installing a Solid State Drive (SSD) is the best way to speed up your computer. While installing a SSD is relatively easy if you know a thing or two about computers, reinstalling Windows and other software all over on the newly installed drive is a tedious task.

While performing a clean install of Windows on SSD is recommended for optimal performance, users who can’t reinstall Windows can migrate the existing Windows installation to a SSD with the help of third-party software. Even though there are plenty of applications out there to help you move Windows to SSD, most of them aren’t free.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is one of the few free tools available to migrate Windows operating system to from HDD to SSD. In this guide, we will show how you can migrate Windows 7 or Windows 8 to a SSD using AOMEI Partition Assistant.

Move Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to SSD

Note that this tool is helpful only if you already have connected to the SSD to your bootable PC or have a migration kit so that you can connect your newly acquired SSD to your bootable PC. In other words, use this guide if you have installed or connected SSD (if you have used some kind of migration kit) to your PC and now want to migrate Windows 7 or Windows 8 to the SSD without reinstalling the same.

Also note that this don’t’ follow this guide if you already have partitioned your SSD as Partition Assistant software requires unallocated space. Proceed further only if you have unallocated space or if you can create unallocated space by shrinking or deleting existing partitions.

This procedure is pretty safe as you’re not deleting data from your existing HDD. If in case, your SSD fails to boot after the migration you can simply boot from the HDD.

Step 1: Head over to this page of AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard edition and download the same. It’s compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

Step 2: Install Partition Assistant by running the downloaded setup file and then following on-screen instructions.

Step 3: Once installed, launch Partition Assistant. Click the option labelled Migrate OS to SSD or HDD present in the left pane to launch the wizard. Alternatively, you can click Wizard menu and then click Migrate OS to SSD or HDD option to start the wizard.

Step 4: When you see Migrate OS to SSD or HDD wizard, simply click Next button to select the unallocated space. Please note that the unallocated space required to migrate the OS depends on the size of the data in the existing Windows partition.

Step 5: Select an unallocated space and then click Next button to continue.

Step 6: In this step, if you want to, you can specify the size of the partition being created out of the unallocated space. And if you prefer to use all the available space for the new partition, simply click Next button.

Click on the Next button to proceed to the next step.

Step 7: We’re almost done! Click on the Finish button to exit the wizard and return to the main window. Click on the Apply button to begin transferring all data from the source partition to the destination partition. Note that you’ll be asked to restart your PC to begin the migration process.

Once the job is done, according to Partition Assistant, you need to shut down your computer, unplug the source disk, and then connect the SSD disk to socket of the original HDD to avoid boot issues.

In other words, once Partition Assistant completes transferring the data, shut down your PC. Unplug the source disk (HDD), connect the SSD to the socket where HDD was connected, connect the HDD to the socket where SSD was connected (if you want to use it) previously and then turn on your PC.

Alternatively, you can use third-party software such as EasyBCD to add the new entry and remove the old entry.