advice on cloning system

[tom arnall <kloro2006@gmail.com>]

At the bottom of this post is a description of my last attempt 
at 'cloning' my old system to my new machine. I put 'cloning' in 
quotes because it's not really that, otherwise I could just 
use 'dd'. The procedure left me with a system that seemed fine 
until I tried to run kdm. The system did this without complaint 
but gave only a blank screen on Terminal 7.

Here is my setup:

	toshiba satellite 1135 with: 
		30GB disk
		debian etch 
		lots of applications 

	toshiba satellite a305-s6857 with:
		320GB disk 
		vista
		
My goal is to install etch alongside vista (dual boot) and to copy 
as many of my applications as I can from my old disk to the new, 
as opposed to re-installing them from the debian repository.

Any suggestions highly appreciated. My research on this turns up 
only examples where people are doing a true cloning via 'dd,' 
which is clearly not applicable to my situation because I want to 
retain vista and because of hardware differences. 

tom arnall
arcata




************************************
LAST ATTEMPT, WHICH FAILED TO SET UP KDM PROPERLY
	
I want to put linux on a new computer, without having to rebuild 
all my applications. Following are the steps I plan to take:

	Install a base system with the same network installer disk
	which I used for the source machine and without getting
	anything from the network.

	Copy to the new machine from old with:
		
		su
		mount /dev/sda3 /sD
	   cp -dRvpu  / /sD  (actually, I copied directories
	   	individually, skipping /dev and of course /sD)

	The drive on the new machine is bigger and of a
	different brand. For the copy, the new drive is
	attached to the old machine as a usb drive.