Hard disk failed. With a little trickery, I was able to coerce the Windows Backup and Restore 320GB VHD drive partition image (which contained only 220GB of actual data) to restore it onto a smaller 256GB (actual ~238GB) partition on my new SSD.
After going through the expected repair, since the drive layout changed, everything is back up and running fine, and all that's left is to update my special folder locations (I used to have pictures, desktop, video, etc. folders on a separate data partition). While doing this, I noticed that almost HALF THE DATA ON THE DRIVE (~100GB) was in %appdata%\Local\Temp.
Is this safe to erase? Why would a temp folder end up with so much data? Is that where things like WinRAR store decompressed files temporarily?
I'm asking these questions, because I'm just very surprised that all this time, it looks like half the data on my main OS drive was disposable, and Windows never clued me in on this. With only 238GB on my SSD, 100GB is precious space.