Upgrading boot and second nvme drives. New drive not fully recognized in external dock

So I have a Sabrant rocket 4.0 2tb nvme that is ‘dying’ according to hwinfo and the sabrant tools. Some kind of firmware issue so I want to move it out of production. And while I’m at it replace my 2tb ‘d’ drive.
I chose Samsung 990 Pro 4tb as replacement. I’ve used the samsung disk magician tools to clone drives many times, but only with sata SSD not nvme. I picked up a usb c nvme dock ( AMZ Pilot ) but the samsung software does not see the drive, and reports it as 2tb ( although the AMZ claims to have a 4tb max ). Device manager and disk management both see a 4tb drive. I tried another external nvme drive caddy with the same result. A cursory bit of looking says that the Samsung software ‘might’ work with a thunderbolt dock which I don’t have.
The MB ( Asus WS WRX80-E Sage ) has a free M.2 slot, but it is under my video card and I’d rather not pull that 4 times to complete the 2 drive swaps. I also have the Hyper card, but it looks like I would have to jigger the bios to enable it for the exercise.

So, any other suggestions of a different dock, or better/different cloning software. I have used Acronis, Minitool but just the paid versions and for this one off I don’t need another purchase.
Clonezilla, macrium, and Diskgenius are available. One better than another?

If you have the ability, put both drives into the same machine using the onboard M.2 slots

then boot into a live linux USB (be sure to backup secure boot and TPM keys if using same machine) and use ddrescue to clone the drive (gddrescue from apt/dnf)

you’ll need to resize within windows after, but it’ll image corrupted drives

Perform an exact disk clone (no auto resize partitions) to the new drive. Boot the new drive, then move/resize the partitions as needed.

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I used DiskGenius to clone the ‘d’ drive to an external dock.
Worked just fine. Still had to take out the GPU to get to the second m.2 slot.
The boot drive I will try tomorrow. Same way.

Boot drive migrated with DiskGenius. No errors/drama
Much ado about nothing, or not as much as feared anyway.

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