Hard drive cloning HELP needed !

I bought a SSD ( Solid State hard drive for those who are learning) for my desk top pc a few years ago. i want to get away from platter drives. It was a Crucial M4 kit with the software to copy the whole hard drive and operating system while it was running. It worked, and has been working for a few years.

So last year I bought a nice Samsung laptop for my classes at Embry-Riddle. I also bought a Samsung 256G SSD that came with cloning software.

All I want to do is copy my laptop drive, to the SSD and then install the SSD and have it running with no issues, like my desktop did.

The Samsung software is Norton Ghost, and all it did was copy the drive data, not the operating system. So when I installed the SSD, it had no operating system to run off of. I reinstalled its platter drive and its happy again, but I spent big bucks on this 256Gig SSD and cannot use it as i intended.

Please tell me what to do, what to buy to clone my laptop drive to the SSD, OS and all.


Thank you. This is a big deal to me.

 

Thank you. I am confused too. I copied my other platter drive and OS while the PC was running, turned it off, installed the SSD, and its been working for 2+ years. The laptop using Norton did not copy anything but the data, so maybe i missed something? i want to copy the platter drive as is to the SSD and run the laptop off that for now on.

Very puzzled why this did not work.

 

Looks like I missed the "warning" on the bottom of page 15 and have to copy that partition first for a bootable drive. thank you. Ill do it over later today.