I use clonezilla to backup my hp pavilion laptop system (dual boot Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows XP) to an external hard drive. If I buy a new laptop, will I be able to clone it from the external drive so as to avoid reloading all my software and files?

Yes. And No as well. If you backed up the entire installation and if your system hardware is similar you can do that. But if your hardware is not same you should defer from doing a clone. Your hardware will not work unless you have correct drivers loaded for it.
Another issue will come if your source hard drive is bigger in size than destination. It will not clone then. Both at least need to be of same capacity but destination can be bigger.

I strongly suggest you just take the backup for data. And install the os from scratch.

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

If you were to get the same hardware then your clone image would be usable. Don't expect the ability of imaging to the newer hardware which will require different driver support.

You could backup the old drive and use the configuration data for the distribution selectively. Even that may require some tweaking.
HAL, udev and rules come to mind as something that will not work. But those should be rewritten when you do a new install. Your basic '/etc/*.conf' files should work.

You could save '/home' but that too may create problems with a new release of your distro but should be OK to use on the same release.

Because of hardware differences, you will probably have to boot to some sort of rescue CD (e.g. your original Ubuntu install CD), mount your "/" partition (and your "/boot" partition if it is separate), and run "update-initramfs". Given the correct parameters, this will update the initrd file in your "/boot" directory.

It has been a while since I had to do this, but I think you need to chroot into the mount point of your "/" partition (e.g. "chroot /mnt/linux") before running "update-initramfs". This is because you want to use the scripts, binaries, and configuration files for your installation. You will need to use the "-c" option to force "update-initramfs" to create a new "initrd" file for the desired kernel (instead of the kernel from the rescue CD). Here is an example from the man page:
You will have to change the part after the "-k" to match the kernel that you will be booting when you boot from the hard drive.

Thanks to all for the helpful replies.

aromaman

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Thanks.

All of these replies helped me see that the problem was far more complex than I had thought. The solution for me will most likey be to avoid fiddling around with the command line but rather to follow the advice from linuxlover.chaitanya and reload the software from the repositories and data from a data backup disk.

I can't see how to mark this thread as solved.

Hi,

You use the 'Tread Tools'.

Go the top of the thread, click on "Thread Tools", and select "Mark this thread as solved".