I want to clone my wife's new laptop hd to a smaller ssd drive the HDD is 500gb the SSD is only 64gb.

The actual space used however is about ~30gb so I know I can use gparted or fdisk to shrink the size of the windows C: partition to about 35gb or so to be safe.

First Question: Now I know I can write that partition file back to the other HD my question is do I need to first create a partition of the same size or will it do it automatically with a command like

dd if=/hd2/windowspartition.img of=/dev/sda1

Second question: I do not need/want to write the partition table to the SSD I believe just the mbr meaning I would use the command

dd if=/hd2/mbr.img of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1

bs=446 indicating mbr only not partition table.

Would this scenario be correct and result in a bootable windows partition?