I have 2 nvme drives in my PC both in the motherboard. In the first NVME slot on the motherboard is a 2tb drive with Windows 11 on it. The second NVME slot on the motherboard is a 1tb drive with Fedora 43 on it. I am ready to try Fedora 43 as the main OS on this PC with Windows 11 as the backup. However, that now means that I would want Fedora 43 on the 2tb drive.
My plan was to delete Windows 11 on the 2tb drive, clone the 1tb drive to the 2tb drive and then reinstall Win 11 on the 1tb drive. (probably removing the 2tb drive while I install Win 11 and putting it back in after).
I’ve cloned drives before without any issues but not with the actual slot in the motherboard changing too. Will this cause any issues with Fedora 43 being moved from slot 2 to slot 1?
It isn’t clear what you hope to gain – do you want more space for Fedora, or is the 2TB drive newer or faster? Massive reorganization always carries a risk of encountering UEFI/BIOS bugs, SSD failure, or a mistake entering a command, so you need good backups. You may have better things to do with the time it will take. Have you considered shrinking the Windows partition and adding the space to Fedora? See: https://itsfoss.gitlab.io/post/how-to-add-a-new-device-to-btrfs-file-system-in-linux/ but check the details with current btrfs documentation to be sure you understand what each command does.
general considerations that i can think of:
if you exchange ssds across slots or add extra ones, their system-assigned names may and probably will change (like nvme1 can become nvme0 or nvme2 etc, resulting in all partitions changing names too, so booting may fail if you don’t adjust these names (especially if drives contain their os bootloaders).
plus you have to make sure that the original uefi partition is still used during boot, not the one from a different drive.
Both. I want the faster and bigger drive for what I hope will be the main OS on this PC. I have still have a few issues with Fedora but hoping they will get fixed.