My win8 Dell Laptop has a 500GB HDD, I bought a 480GB SSD for hard disk replacement. Unfortunately, the 500GB HDD's partitions span the whole disk, the exact layout copying wasn't possible.
I formatted the SSD to a GPT disk, then use various cloning softwares to do the cloning. I tried Macrium Reflect Free, EaseUS Partition Master, Minitool Partition Wizard. None of them get me to Windows startup screen.
The last one I used is Minitool Partition Wizard. During boot, it said can't find OS. So I tried changing different bios settings out of desperation and hoped one would work. It did.
The setting is "disable virtualization". I don't know why it worked, it doesn't make any sense, I'm just glad it did.
So if you have problem migrating HDD to SSD, this might be something you can try.
