Recovery from hard drive failure

[Peter Tenenbaum <peter.g.tenenbaum@gmail.com>]

Hi everyone -- a few days ago the hard drive in my home Debian system started making unhappy noises and refuses to boot.  I discussed the situation with knowledgeable people and they diagnosed that indeed the hard drive had failed and needs replacement.

I have a recent backup of the hard drive which I made using dump, and I have a new hard drive on order.  My recovery plan is as follows:

1.  Burn a new netinst CD from a recent build (I am running Squeeze, btw)
2.  Replace the hard drive
3.  Use the netinst CD to set up the filesystem on the new hard drive
4.  Recover the backup using restore.

Here's my question:  should I allow the netinst CD to install Debian on the new hard drive, given that I plan to use restore to restore everything and thus would overwrite any new installation?  I realize that I can probably tune the action of the restore command so that it only restores what I need from the backup and doesn't touch a new OS install; but I think that the process of making the decisions for what needs to be restored and what does not would be complex, time-consuming, and error-prone; so I would rather just restore the whole thing.

Any advice you can offer would be welcome.  

Thanks in advance,
-PT