Migrating system to RAID-1/LVM

[David Bruce <dbruce@tampabay.rr.com>]

As a result of reiserfs corruption, I'm moving my system to ext3 (or maybe 
JFS - haven't decided for sure).  I previously had a RAID-1/LVM setup on hda 
and hdc, and the corruption occurred in my /home but nothing was lost.

I have put a new disk in hdb and moved everything there with ddrescue - the 
system now boots off the new disk without using hda or hdc. Also, all the 
reiserfs partitions on the new disk are OK by fsck.  The installation has 
separate partitions for /, /boot, /var, /tmp, /usr, and /home.

I want to redo and un-cruft the hda/hdc RAID1/LVM installation.  My thought is 
to do a clean install onto the disks with the etch installer.

My question is how to best get my data from the hdb install onto the new 
hda/hdc RAID install.  /home should be easy (I think using tar... | cd 
tar ...).  As far as the other partitions are concerned, can I just copy them 
over with the 'tar' method ?  I am mostly worried about clobbering the 
settings for RAID and LVM in the new system.

If I don't do a straight copy of my partitions other than /home, how can I at 
least get the same apt packages installed? Also, there are of course a lot of 
settings in /etc that I would like to keep - is there a simple way to 
bring /etc over without messing up the settings for raid and lvm?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated - thanks!
-- 
David Bruce