Fastest Way to Clone Bootable USB Drive in Windows 7/8/10

June 3, 2019

Learn the detailed steps to clone bootable USB flash/thumb drive to hard drive or to another USB stick in Windows 7 using cloning software AOMEI Backupper.

What is a bootable USB drive?

To some extent, a bootable USB drive is like an installation disc, which is provided by computer manufacturer. It allows you to boot your computer and troubleshoot your computer when disaster happen. You just need to enter BIOS and change boot priority for it.

Today, on many computers, only the USB interface is reserved, not the optical drive. Thus, bootable device, such as, USB bootable drive, becomes more and more popular.

You can’t just copy and paste files

USB drives mostly are used to store and transfer personal data in old days, thus many users still use the previous way, that is, Copy and Paste, to transfer files from one USB drive to another.

It’s useful if you just want to copy personal files and folders to another USB drive. Assuming that the USB drive contains bootable partition, including its master boot record (MBR), slack space, and any unused space, simply drag and drop it to a new flash drive cannot work.

In a way, you can’t just copy and paste files if the USB is a bootable drive. You need to clone USB bootable flash drive.

Why need to clone USB bootable drive?

Nowadays, more and more PC users would use USB drive as boot device for disaster recovery. Bootable USB flash drive contains boot files that can be used to start a computer. If you have a system ISO image on any device, you can use it to restore your computer with this bootable USB drive. It’s important.

More so, with lots of times of plugin and plug-out, your computer may be infected by virus on your computer, or it’s corrupted or damaged for a certain reason.

In addition, like upgrading hard drive in PC, you may like to upgrade USB drive with larger ones when it is fulfilled with stuff.

Thus, you can choose to clone bootable USB thumb drive to another one for security or larger capacity. It’s accepted as a way to back it up. You can still boot the computer even the first bootable USB drive is broken or likewise.

What else can USB bootable drive do? You can use it to deploy the same bootable device to other computers via cloning bootable USB drive to another USB drive. For example, you have a bootable USB stick and system image, you can transfer it to other colleagues so that they can do the same restoration. As a result, copy USB to USB is necessary.

How to clone USB bootable drive in Windows easily?

That’s too bad that Windows doesn’t come with clone feature. Thus, it is better to turn to professional third-party software to clone bootable USB drive. There are lots of cloning tools out there but which one is the best choice? Given that you want to upgrade USB drive, the cloning software should have more than sector by sector cloning method. Because the intelligent cloning feature would skip bad sectors and ensure successful cloning in the process if the USB drive damages a little. I recommend you bootable USB clone tool AOMEI Backupper Professional.

It allows you to clone bootable usb drive to another usb drive, hard drive, SSD by Disk Clone feature. All partitions including boot drive and data drive on the USB stick will be cloned to target disk in several clicks. You have options to decide whether keep the same layout or adjust partition size on the destination disk before starting cloning.

Clone bootable USB drive in Windows 7 step by step

1. Boot up computer normally, and plug in the bootable USB drive as well as the target disk to your PC. Make sure both of them can be detected by Windows. Install and launch AOMEI Backupper. Select Clone and click Disk Clone.

Disk Clone

2. Select the bootable USB flash drive here.

Source Disk

3. Then select the destination disk that you want to clone bootable USB drive to. It can be HDD or another USB drive.

Destination Disk

4. Click Edit partitions on the destination disk to adjust partition size if you wish. If the target disk is an SSD, check Align partitions to optimize for SSD to get peak performance. Click Start Clone after configuration.

Start Clone

Tips: Please note that ticking Sector by sector clone box will make resize partitions unavailable.


Within a few moves you are able to clone USB bootable drive to other places in Windows 7. Above method also applies to Windows 10, 8, 8.1, Vista and Windows XP since AOMEI Backupper Professional supports all these operating systems. In fact, this cloning software is also great USB automatic backup software. It provides incremental backup and differential backup with daily, weekly, and monthly mode. As backup solution, it supports backup Windows system to USB drive without encounter “The drive is not a valid backup location” warning.

In brief, AOMEI Backupper Professional is a great software you deserve. Download and enjoy your new jouney. If you are using server-based computer, you can consider AOMEI Backupper Server.