CloneZilla, Macrium Reflect
I could be wrong but the way the OP worded his post I dont think thats what he's talking about doing.... I think he mean's copying his OS from the original HDD over to the new SSD, so he can use the SSD as the boot drive. IF thats what he mean, those will fail i believe.
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If you mean what i think you mean.....
win7 and up, not worth the effort for most people. unless you were cloning it to the same size/or larger and type of HDD. Otherwise fresh re-installing to the SSD would be your easiest option.
I have not used win7 or SSD's, but from what i hear. Its a bad Idea because Trim/alignment/etc partition settings that ssd's need, where the original hdd did not have or need.
And equally as trouble some or worse, the fact your original OS partition is probably larger than the SSD.. partitions are only safe to extend(make larger) but not shrink. there are programs that can shrink your partition, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you already had an OS backup before attempting that.
If you were talking about pre-win7 though, its probably easy.. probably still doable even with win7(if theres a will theres a way) but win7 utilizes 2 partitions and is even more strict and freaks out with unauthorized system changes. I'm not familiar with win7, it may still be fine after the /sysprep method, however I'm not familiar, resizing its partition may require more registry hacks or something to get it not complaining about new partition size.
I doubt, but if your refering to something pre-win7, you can attempt it with this for example and it will probably work fine, and it won't require you tampering with the original partition size befor hand, you just need to preformat the SSD..
http://www.fsarchiver.org/Cloning-ntfs
http://www.fsarchiver.org/QuickStart
