Re: how to transfer
Contacts are not stored on the SD card. Best way to do this is to have all contacts saved to your Google (Gmail) account. This way you always have instant online backup so you never lose contacts, and restoring or transferring contacts is simple. Just sync to the phone.
Transfer of music, photos, etc can bed done several ways. Copy to a computer via USB cable, wifi transfer with Airdroid or a similar app, or upload to cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Then copy to the new card.