Ok so this may sound stupid to some so please be nice.
I have an old laptop that is running windows vista on a 250gb Hdd. I want to clone that hard drive to an ssd. Is there an easy way of doing this. I have heard and do know how to clone hard drives but all of them require the use of a larger partition on the new drive or just a bigger drive altogether. Is there a way of doing this while using the same size drive or partition.
I think you can buy a USB to Sata adapter that comes with some migration tool on a CD but I hear that isn't a perfect way to do it. The best way is to install a fresh copy of Windows
Yes. You can use clonezilla. Basically you can create an image on an external hdd install the new hdd then copy the image back over. If you want to resize the partition to make it smaller prior to cloning use gparted. These can be both used as live cds and will probably do what you want.
Awesome. Thank you for that. I forgot about clonezilla. I used that one time before on a friends computer once, or maybe it was the parents, I don't remember but thanks for the reminder.