Kevin Philp wrote:
I would say "be very careful". It will work if the following are true:1. All the drivers loaded on computer A are the same as required for computer B - do they have the same CPU/motherboard chipset/graphics card2. Your partitions are the same and match up in FSTAB - be particularly careful if your FSTAB uses UUID notation.3. You will need to reinstall grub into the MBR anyway.I would be pleased to hear others peoples comments because this would make my backup procedure easier - but unless the computers are the same/very similar I am not confident its a sensible approach.Kevin.
Recently I've upgraded my workstation. I changed motherboard and went from AMD to Intel. Hard drive stayed the same and Debian booted without problem. But since I had problems with this installation before I wanted to reinstall and lazy as I am, I just copied the Debian installation from my home computer with different motherboard, same CPU and different graphics card (nVidia -> ATi) and completely different partition structure. I copied the files (using cp not dd) to a second (new/additional) hard drive and this caused me some problems with Grub trying to boot from the old hard drive. After some mild tweaking (Grub and X) I ended up with fully configured working Debian installation.
Some time ago I made something similar on my laptop. I copied files to external disk, deleted an rearranged partitions and copied the files back. Setup Grub and boot without problem.
Regards, Mitja