Unable to clone drive

[Boyborg690]

So I'm going about my day when my ancient 250 GB starts to fail. I've never had any problems with it before until a week ago. It's starting to fail and I'm trying to clone over my drive. I lost my Windows Key so a reinstall is out of the question. I got a 120 GB SSD in the mail from a friend and I tried to clone it over using Ubuntu. I attempted to shrink the 250 GB Partition with the tool thing and that didn't work. I attempted to do the same thing in the Terminal and it didn't work. I got onto the internet so search it up and I found out about Clonezilla. Not reading the description I burned a CD and I attempted to clone. Apparently Clonezilla won't clone larger partitions onto smaller ones. My buddy told me Acronis was the way to go so I attempted to use that. I burned a CD and then when I tried to boot it the thing refused. I attempted to get back onto Windows and I found an error code. It wouldn't let me boot. I looked up the error code, punched some stuff into CMD and booted again to flip off Windows. I'm in a jam here because my drive may die in a few days time. I'm not wanting to purchase another Windows 10 key because I hate Microsoft. Reason? They hid the article I found because it was critical of them. It actually had the proper fix to it besides just "Using the boot fixing program" and it got the damned thing working again. Once again: HELP ME! My drives may die any moment now.

[lttUser1234]

Why not get a drive of equal or larger size and then clone the drive that way. Then you'll have extra space. Changing out a hard drive shouldn't require you to re-activate Windows, but I'm not sure.

[JoostinOnline]

23 hours ago, Boyborg690 said:

Snip

I have to do this a lot for work. It goes wrong around 80% of the time to be honest. You'd think by now I'd have all the steps memorized, but it takes a fair amount of work to get it right. Do you have a Microsoft account on your old install? If so, your key is saved on that and you can do a fresh install. Once you sign in, it will detect your old computer and activate properly.

1 hour ago, lttUser1234 said:

Why not get a drive of equal or larger size and then clone the drive that way. Then you'll have extra space. Changing out a hard drive shouldn't require you to re-activate Windows, but I'm not sure.

Ever heard of this thing called a budget?