same debian, new hardware?

[Krzys Majewski <majewski@cs.ubc.ca>]

Again on the subject of buying new hardware, I'm looking for a good
way to copy my existing setup to the new machine. So far I can think
of three main types of options. In order of decreasing popularity, they
are:

1) Reinstall everything from scratch, then copy my home directory and some
conf files from the old machine to the new machine.

2) Install a minimal system on the new machine, then copy everything
from the old machine to the new machine.

3) Make binary images of the old hard drives, automagically paste these
onto the new hard drive. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this is impossible.

4) Physically install the old hard drives in the new machine.

Here are my comments on these:

1) This strikes me as completely wasted.
Also difficult because I'll have a home dir and an /etc on the new machine,
so I'll have to think carefully about which files from the old machine
should overwrite the new files, which files shouldn't be copied, blah blah.
The main reason I would like to avoid this is because I like my software,
it's the hardware I want to upgrade.

2) I've done this once before, it works with linux fairly well. I just copy
everything, but I ask cp to prompt me if the file already exists on the 
new machine.  Unfortunately I don't know if I can do this with Windows.
I suspect I can't, and it is nice to have Windows around for various reasons.

3) This is what I want, but as described it can't be done, since different
drives have different geometries and so on. However, I know that it is possible
to make a fairly generic kernel that will run on different machines
(viz. root/boot floppies), so the linux itself should be portable at least
for the first little bit until I recompile the kernel.

4) This would be nice, but can it be done? My hard drives are old and small. 
Also they are sitting on a SCSI card, is this a good thing or a bad thing? 
The SCSI card is probably ISA, can I stick it in a new machine and hope
it will work? If someone can suggest how to make this work then I would
gradually migrate stuff to the new big hard drive on the new fast 
expensive machine.  

I know this is a linux forum, but I'm also interested in moving Windows 
to the new machine. Presumably this means I have to reinstall it?
Can I do some variation of item #2) on my windows partition? 

I'd be grateful for any comments or stories you may have,
chris