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Successfully swapped out a dying hard drive with a new solid state drive on my daily driver laptop.
Purchased a Samsung EVO 512GB 2 1/2 inch internal drive ( SSD ). Placed it into my CD/ROM media unit caddie for SATA drives and booted up my machine. Now with the new drive connected, I use native windows 10 tools to write partition info on it with a 300GB partition ( same size as the dying drive's partition ) and format it NTFS.
Downloaded Clonezilla Live zip file, extracted to a USB thumb drive and then made that bootable using /utils/win64/makeboot64 on the USB drive.
Shutdown and booted the Clonezilla software from the USB drive by editing the BIOS to boot from the USB stick first and the HDD second. The software is GUI driven. I used disk-to-disk cloning and successfully recovered ( -recovery ) the Operating System environment as well as all my installed programs/data and my personal files. Basically made an exact replica of my old HDD onto my new SSD.
Fun fun... This process took about an hour from start to finish. It was writing at 7GB/minute onto the new SSD.
Installed the new SSD into the laptop's HDD bay ( internal ) and booted. Now I'm typing out this message to you all.
...On a MUCH faster machine.
-klb