I got a pc from a friend, that he claimed, never worked. I put in a ubuntu cd, and started installing. Everything seems fine up to now, but I might have been a bit short sighted. If it works, I will want to transfer my current setup to this pc, as it's more than twice as fast as mine.
So: How hotpluggable can I expect Ubuntu to be? I expect to have to reconfigure the x-server... what else am I in for if I just copy everything? Also, what is the smartest way to do this? I have to transfer it from an ide to an sata drive. Just cp -p ? dd ?
Or maybe the smarter way would be to just copy the home folder and programs, after I've set up the more critical stuff like the vmware kernel module, nvidia driver and so on.

I can imagine answers ranging from "oh, sure" to a slap above the head. I'm totally clueless.

Your best bet would be to simply copy over /home, as that will have your per-user configuration files (which will make up 90% of your system customization on a desktop system). The rest of the configuration is going to be handled in /etc, and the system is going to ask you most of that during the install anyway.

There is really no point in copying the entire OS from one drive to the other, not unless you have made some massive modifications. Doing a clean install and just moving over the important config files should be more than enough.

Well, no massive modifications, but I have a patched version of wine... and a massive amount of audio applications, synths and stuff with names that are impossible to remember. I'd have to make a list. I would spend the next week constantly installing stuff that I forgot. I would very much like to avoid that.

Just copy the whole thing over. Depending on the distro, it'll probably auto-detect all hardware on startup anyway and configure itself. Linux is actually a lot better about that than Windows is.

I've moved entire systems several times with only minor issues.

You are correct. I've just put in the old hd, and put it in grub, and it started without trouble. Since I want to keep the sata hd, I've just copied everything over, and it works. The old hd went into another pc that I am setting up with winXP for recording, and just for the fun of it, I just let it boot into linux... and it works. Automatically switched to the ATI drivers... and so on.
Very nice... now I can go on and install XP... wheee!

Hi,

You should actually install your M$ WinXP first. A lot easier to setup the M$ first then install your Linux.

You could 'dd' your partition(s) from one HDD to another HDD without trouble. 'Learn The DD Command Revised' is a great LQ post that you can reference.