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.