Creating Bootable Clone from Apple Silicon Mac

[mschmitt]

Did another erase-then-copy, tried to startup from it, but it goes through the same authorize users, set owner loop as previously described. Which is weird, since this worked the first time I tried an erase-then-copy.

Do I need to completely erase (repartition) the drive to clear out whatever hidden data is there? What I did was erase the APFS container in that partition, changing it to HFS+, then erase that and create as APFS.