Cloning an entire laptop drive to a partition on an external drive

The hard drive on my laptop is, of course, out of space so I'm planning on installing a new drive.

The question: should I partition the new drive before or after I clone it?

To be clear. The current drive is 250GB with a single partition (well, excluding the hidden stuff from Toshiba - I'm not sure how the SW sees that). I want the new drive to have two partitions.

Is it better to partition the new drive (c and d) and then clone the current drive to the C partition (which will be probably 300 GB) or

should I clone the current laptop drive to an unpartitioned new drive and then partition that drive?

Do I have a choice? If I do, which strategy is likely to cause the least headaches.

question -
why do you want to make two partitions, on the laptop?

it may be easier to clone the drive to the NEW drive, (keeping all partitions) (enclosed in an external usb case), as is, and then put the NEW drive in, and you should be able to just start the computer up.

also, what is the SIZE of your new drive?