I recently got back into linux. I have an old laptop that I am using as a dedicated linux box, however, I just upgraded my desktop to a motherboard that has two m.2 slots. So my question is, would I run into any problems if I were to buy a second m.2 sata drive, temporarily remove my windows m.2, install linux onto my second m.2, and then install both m.2 drives back into the computer? I would then go into the bios and select which drive I want to boot into as the first boot option. I was planning on doing this instead of the typical dual boot method, because in the past, that caused problems when I decided to remove linux, and go back to just single booting windows. I also don't want to run linux in a virtual machine.

I decided to give AOMEI a go, and am currently in the process of cloning the old drive to the new drive... which is taking forever, but is at 79% right now, so I am almost done.

I'm following 4wd's guide, because AOMEI had a free version of their software, and 4wd's guide seemed the easiest method that I can be the most laziest and not have to do much.

Side note: I ordered the drive from Amazon, and it arrived in one of their bubble mailer things, but inside of that was a Newegg box... so I guess Amazon resales Newegg drives. (was sold and shipped by amazon.com)


Edit: So everything seems to have worked. I now have a non-dying drive with two partitions on it. One of which has all of the contents of my old drive, and the other that currently has nothing on it, because I don't feel like moving one of my steam libraries today.

Also, for whatever reason AOMEI decided to make the partition on the new drive  MBR instead of GPT, and I didn't notice it until it was at 85%. Luckily I ran across a free tool called Minitool partition wizard which was able to convert the partition to GPT without deleting the contents of the drive. (AOMEI also could do the job apparently, however I didn't feel like spending $45USD just to convert a partition.