I just bought a new laptop and will be replacing the crappy 5400 HD with a Samsung 840EVO 500GB.

Will the Samsung migration software suffice or would it be better to use a third party cloning app? I read that the Samsung software won't clone the files necessary for reinstalling Windows 8.1. Thanks in advance.

I would just give it a shot. I don't think there is any cloning software that hasn't failed for someone. I would make an image of the HDD to an external drive before I started, though.

I did the same thing with a Lenovo when there was only 8.0 and had a few problems. There were like 7 partitions that had to be resized (smaller) and it was difficult with one program. Another program just froze on me.

I eventually found a program that made it fairly easy, "Farstone DriveClone". What I didn't like about the program is that the service it installs causes a nag screen to buy the product. Uninstalling the program or disabling the service, after you're done, cures that.

I think OP's asking specifically as to whether Samsung Magician (or whatever it's called) will clone the recovery partition as well as the active partition (i.e. concern that the cloning will be fine but if something went wrong in future he'd have no backup plan). I seem to remember reading something about that but it wasn't relevant when I installed an EVO earlier this year.

OP, several forums had good material on this when I was researching my own upgrade, so if you don't get more answers here play around with Google a bit.

On second look, I see you are correct.

Lenovo has a "One Step Restore" which I lost the function of when I cloned to ssd. Apparently, if you change the partitions in any way this is the result. There was conflicting advice on the Lenovo forums about how to avoid this but it wasn't that big of a concern to me. If everything went to hell I could always buy the disc from them.

This is not really a problem if you will still have the original HD which you can put back in and start over with the cloning.

A better solution is to make images of the ssd regularly, and archive the first few, so you will never have to bother with starting all over again. This has saved me more than once.

It would also be a good idea if OP visited the computer manufacturer's forum to see what they have to say.

I believe another issue with some of third party cloning apps is it wouldn't work if the SSD was smaller than the HD to be replaced. I'll do some more research and probably just go with the Samsung migration software and see how it goes.

Proportional cloning has been around for a while