Generally speaking, a hard drive may be failing due to virus attacks, a sudden power outage, bad sectors, and more. Then, unexpected data loss turns up. If the system disk goes wrong, Windows may easily fail to boot. Well then, what should you do?
You need to take measures to fix the issue. But if you ghost hard drive in Windows 7/8/10/11 in advance, things will become easier: the backup is available to restore the system and data.
On the other hand, ghosting a Windows hard drive to another hard disk can be counted as a good solution for a disk upgrade when the system disk is too smaller and older.
How to ghost a hard drive for your PC? Go to the next part.
How to Ghost Hard Drive Windows 11/10/8/7
To make sure data security, it is necessary to come up with a good strategy to ghost drive. In terms of data backup, the straightforward way is worth mentioning. In this part, two ways for ghosting a hard drive are mentioned – image and clone.
How to Make a Ghost Image of Windows 7/8/10/11
This refers to creating a disk image. To be specific, it creates a complete copy or snapshot of the contents of your hard drive, and all data will be compressed into an image.
Actually, you can ghost more than one image and save them to an external hard drive. When hard drive failure or system corruption appears, you can revert your computer to the correct status via the recovery from the image file you have created.
Well then, how to ghost a hard drive via disk imaging? The best way is to run a professional ghost hard drive freeware to ghost backups. On the market online, you can find multiple ghost disk utilities and here we strongly recommend running MiniTool ShadowMaker, one of the best software to ghost hard drive. With it, you can easily and effectively achieve your aim.
As an all-in-one PC backup software, MiniTool ShadowMaker functions well in Windows 11/10/8/7. You can run it to create an image backup for the Windows operating system, file, folder, disk, or partition. This free ghost image software can guarantee your data security to a great extent.
If you are interested in this ghost drive software, get it by clicking the following download button and installing it on your PC. This trial edition gives a 30-day free trial.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
How to create a ghost image of Windows 7/8/10/11 step by step? Let’s look at the instructions below.
Step 1: Launch MiniTool ShadowMaker you have installed on your computer and click Keep Trial to continue.
Step 2: On the Backup page, you can find MiniTool ShadowMaker will ghost the Windows system by default: all the system drives required for Windows OS to run have been selected.
Here your purpose is to ghost hard drive. So tap on the SOURCE section, click on Disks and Partitions, select a disk, and choose all the partitions on the selected disk. Here we choose a system disk.
If you only want to ghost Windows 11/10/8/7 or create a Windows ghost image with this computer ghosting software, skip to Step 3.
Step 3: After selecting the hard drive, you need to choose a path to save the disk image file. Go to the DESTINATION section and choose a path like an external drive based on your needs.
If you want to make some advanced settings like configuring some options, setting scheduled plans, or choosing a backup scheme, you can tap on Options to choose the corresponding feature. Let’s see some details.
Backup Options
This feature enables you to make many settings for the hard drive backup, including selecting an image creation mode, setting file size, deciding file compression level, adding a comment for the backup, and more.
Backup Scheme
You can enable this feature and choose a scheme, then set how many versions of the backup image file to be retained on the PC. By deleting old backups, the disk space is managed well.
Schedule Settings
This feature is off by default. If you want to create an automatic backup for the backup image of the system disk, please turn on it. Then, choose one schedule setting when there is a need.
So far, we have told you how to create a ghost image of Windows 11/10/8/7 step by step. While system disk failure or system crash occurs, use the image file you have ghosted to restore your computer to the previous date.
How can you restore your PC from an external hard drive? Refer to this post - Easily Restore System Image from External Hard Drive in Windows 11/10/8/7.
If you are looking for ghost software for Windows 7/8/10/11 to ghost hard drive to SSD/HDD, free download this ghost disk utility to have a try at once.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
How to Ghost Hard Drive to SSD
Besides creating ghost images in Windows 11/10/8/7, is there another way to ghost a computer hard drive? Of course, you can choose to ghost hard drive by cloning the hard drive to an external drive or SSD. In simple terms, a clone means a direct copy bit by bit.
Like that, all the data on the destination drive is identical to the data on the source drive. Everything (from the PC desktop to the device drivers, or from the OS to the hidden directory files) is copied identically. In this way, all the contents can be directly backed up to another disk.
Run MiniTool ShadowMaker to Ghost Hard Drive to SSD
Well then, how to ghost hard drive to SSD for disk backup or upgrade? MiniTool ShadowMaker can also help a lot. It offers you a powerful feature called Clone Disk.
With this ghost hard drive freeware, you can effectively clone the hard drive of the computer including a laptop and desktop to a new hard drive, such as SSD or HDD. Free download this hard disk to hard disk ghost software on your Windows 11/10/8/7 computer to have a try now!
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
See how to ghost a hard drive to an SSD/external drive:
Step 1: Launch MiniTool ShadowMaker and tap on Keep Trial to go on.
Step 2: Go to the Tools page and click Clone Disk to ghost hard drive to SSD.
Step 3: In the following interface, select an original hard drive and a target hard disk. Note that the target disk should be large enough to hold all data on the source disk.
Related post: MiniTool Programs Help to Clone Hard Drive to Smaller SSD
Step 4: Then MiniTool ShadowMaker enters the process page where you can see the rate of progress. And you need to wait for a few minutes, so be patient. When the operation is completed, you can receive some information as shown below.
You should make sure either the original hard drive or the target disk is disconnected from your computer. Or else, the Windows operating system may mark one disk as offline. This is because both the source disk and the target disk have the same signature. Just remove one that you don’t need.
Do you want to ghost hard drive in Windows 11/10/8/7 via disk cloning with MiniTool ShadowMaker? Just get this ghost clone software for a free trial.
MiniTool ShadowMaker TrialClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
Use MiniTool Partition Wizard to Ghost Hard Drive
In addition to MiniTool ShadowMaker, you can run another disk cloning software for ghosting a computer hard drive. And it is MiniTool Partition Wizard, a professional and free partition manager. This disk utility offers two features – Copy Disk and Migrate OS to SSD/HD to help you easily ghost hard drive for Windows 7/8/10/11.
Copy Disk helps to clone the system disk as well as a data disk. And Migrate OS to SSD/HD enables you to only migrate OS drives to another disk or clone the entire system disk. Just choose one to get started.
If you need to deal with the system disk, MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition cannot help and you need to use Professional Edition or higher.
MiniTool Partition Wizard FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe
How to ghost a hard drive with this ghost drive software? Follow the steps below. Here we take Copy Disk as an example.
Step 1: Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to its main interface. Then, click Copy Disk Wizard to continue.
Step 2: Choose the system disk to copy.
Step 3: Select a destination disk to store the source contents.
Here the target disk should be big enough to hold all data on the source disk. Moreover, the cloning process can overwrite the data on the target disk, so make sure no important data is saved to the target drive.
Step 4: Choose one copy option based on your actual need.
Step 5: Then some information about how to boot from the target disk will be shown here. Just do it in the event of system corruption. Finally, tap on Apply.
If you want to know some information on OS migration, this post - Easily Migrate Windows 10 to SSD Without Reinstalling OS Now helps a lot.
Bottom Line
That’s information about how to ghost a hard drive in Windows 11/10/8/7 in two ways – disk imaging and cloning.
Employing MiniTool ShadowMaker, ghosting the disk is very easy. You can run this computer ghosting software to create an image or clone a hard drive to SSD/HD. In addition, another piece of ghost drive software – MiniTool Partition Wizard is helpful to clone your disk for backup. Just choose one to get started based on your needs.
Suppose that you have some questions while using our software, leave a comment below to let us know.
About The Author
Position: Columnist
Vera is an editor of the MiniTool Team since 2016 who has more than 7 years’ writing experiences in the field of technical articles. Her articles mainly focus on disk & partition management, PC data recovery, video conversion, as well as PC backup & restore, helping users to solve some errors and issues when using their computers. In her spare times, she likes shopping, playing games and reading some articles.