Free way to clone HDD to SSD?

PartedMagic

UPDATE: since circa 2014, PartedMagic is no longer free to download, although still technically FOSS (in the sense that you can build it from source).

PartedMagic is a free (FOSS actually) Linux-based tool that can perform almost any operations with disk drives, including copying, resizing and moving partitions. It can be booted from CD, USB flash drive or network and is very small (around 70 MB).

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Clonezilla

clonezilla is a free Linux based tool made for hard disk backups.


Windows 7 actually behaves differently when it is installed on an SSD:

When a solid state drive is present, Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyBoost, as well as boot and application launch prefetching.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-solid-state-drives-ssd,7717.html

I'm not sure if all this will be done automatically if you clone to an SSD instead of a fresh Windows install...

Something you might want to think about