I just bought a ssd to replace the hdd in my old netbook, since it has no optical drive I also bought a usb enclosure to clone the present hdd.

I figure I’ll use one of the cloning softwares to do it, not sure which one yet. The present hdd is partitioned into three drives, with two being recovery and some bios update stuff. I’m not sure if I should clone all three or just leave out the other two. I have the recovery backed up on another external hdd. Can win 7 separate some free space from one drive to form a new partition without reformat the whole thing down the road?

If I choose to clone the three partitions as is, should I format the ssd into three drivrs manually first, or could any cloning software do it altogether? Similar to previous, can win 7 merge partitions to form one drive without format the whole thing (I think might have done this a long time ago, don’t remember anymore).