Good idea to clone HDD to ssd?

[waynebob]

Well I tried cloning on my spare machine.
    -used gparted to shrink 500 gb hdd to 136 gb          succesful ?
    -used clonezilla to clone from 136gb partition to 160 gb hdd    succesful ?
Now the target 160gb hdd will boot (to a grub menu though?)
The source 136gb partition (on 500gb hdd) will not boot even though configured in bios and identified as bootable.
When I unplug the 160gb hdd the 136gb partition will boot (to a grub menu though)
Tried a boot repair disk, both ways still boot to a grub menu first and the source drive (136gb) still will not boot if the 160gb is plugged in.

On my main machine I did a clean install to the M.2 500gb drive. Used Timeshift to restore my backup from 1TB HDD. Worked like a charm or so I thought. After a couple of restarts all the browser logins were not there anymore?
Starting to think Joe Collin’s thoughts about just doing a fresh install, especially to a new SSD would be easier and probably better in the long run.
Reading up on grub and grub2 repair stuff and lose interest pretty quick. Getting old (70)
Not really sure if the gparted or the clonezilla broke the boot.

Thanks for the help, I shall keep farting around but a fresh install looks good.

Wayne.