I recently used Gparted to copy and paste partitions from a NVMe to a M.2 SATA SSD.
You just switch between each drive and copy all partitions to the new SSD. You must use “Manage Flags” to flag the ESP partition as Boot and flag it as a ESP partition on the new SSD, or it will not boot. Do not forget that step! As you paste partitions you can enlarge them etc.
My $10 yard sale laptop now boots Tumbleweed or Mageia, with everything customized just like on my desktop. I have my wallpapers and everything.
There is a drawback here. The UUID’s of the partitions on the new drive match the ID’s on the source drive, so you can’t install it in the same computer without changing the UUID’s. You can’t even mount a partition to the machine with the source drive because of ID conflicts.
You can change the UUID’s , but then you have to do chroot and reinstall the boot loader using the new UUID’s. That’s a whole other story, sort of like what you did.
NOTE: You might have been able to just set the ESP and Boot flags without doing the chroot etc. I don’t know because I have never used Foxclone.
NOTE: If two machines are using cloned drives on the same network, you’ll need to change the hostname of one of them, probably the machine with the newly cloned drive. Also, check KDE Connect. The machine name can be set there and it’ll be the same as the source machine.
There’s many ways to clone a drive and I’ll look at Foxclone (Thanks!). Pasting partitions works but it’d be easier with a one click and go system. I know you can use commands, but when you paste partitions you have the opportunity to enlarge them very easily.
I have NVMe enclosures but I picked up one of these for just $9 (It’s $21 but I watch sales regularly). It’s fast, easy, no tools, no fiddling with a NVMe enclosure, and works with M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe SSD’s.
USB to M.2 NVME SATA SSD Docking Station, USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.2 Type-C NVME Reader, Support Maximum 10Gbps Data Transfer, Compatible with 2230/2242/2260/2280