Clone drive C: (500 GB HDD - 2 partitions) onto 125 GB SSD ?

Thank you to Lady Fitzgerald and SIW2 for your continued support :)

I am still learning and I learn from my mistakes

mfj, I see we're simply looking at this from different vantage-points.
You are certainly correct concerning:
-- the target drive receiving either the cloning or the full image restoring definitely will be changing MFT & so on,
I was looking at what will happen to the external drive being used as a backup HD or as a backup clone HD.
We are looking at potentially three drives:
-- the original internal drive, designated as the source drive, that is to be either cloned or full image backed up
-- the external drive, designated as the backup or clone backup drive
-- the same or different internal drive, now designated as a target drive, which receives either the clone or the full image

At last it is all coming together.

At the beginning of this thread I had purchased SSD (125GB) + extra 2.5" HDD (500GB) as dedicated "toys" to experiment with cloning and imaging. One HDD in the breach, the second HDD and the SSD on standby.
I am fortunate that I have other PCs to fall back on.

I screwed up both HDDs with free MiniTools (my fault) and ended up no OS.
Free AOMEI BackUpper is also crippled.
Discovered free AOMEI Partition Assistant and tried to recover the C: drive, but too late all was lost.

The best thing I have done was to buy an AOMEI package BackUpper-PRO with PartitionAssistant-PRO.
So I don't hit limitations of crippled free versions any more.

Tonight and tomorrow I plan on reinstalling Win-7 PRO x64 (based on an ISO file) onto the SSD.
Then clone the SSD onto one of the HDDs and swap the HDD into the Lenovo for a fresh start
My theory is the SSD as a my ultimate fallback to avoid clean installs; and images of the HDD OS on a routine basis as backups. Particularly image before testing software. If I keep the tested software I keep going until (before the next program test) create another image, test the next program and so on.
All my data is stored on an external HDD (and backed up onto another HDD)

Sounds complex to newbies but I am starting to get the hang of it

Thank you Lady Fitzgerald for your patience and support ... I will return.