Yes, my experience too. In fact when changing out entire machines I've done it by making a clone with Clonezilla including boot sectors and then copying the clone back onto the new machine. Had one problem a couple of years ago, as Mark says, with xorg, but the way I handled that was the quick and dirty method of starting from a live CD, copying the config files onto the new hard drive, and bingo, everything worked.
If you have untechnical users and you do this a few times, they get totally spoiled. They get used to just buying a completely new machine, and having the desktop and everything work identically a couple of hours later. Isn't that how it ought to work? What's so special about that?
The thing that has been more disruptive than anything else lately is Gnome 3. I've had to move to xfce to keep the desktop as it was, but arrange to have it work with the familiar gnome file manager, and I still don't have the desktop fonts in white as they used to be. Must be some confguration file someplace where you can set this. Simply cannot imagine what the Gnome people thought they were doing. I tried LXDE too, but XFCE turned out to be more acceptable.
Peter
On Friday 01 March 2013 18:04:54 Mark Rogers wrote:
On 28 February 2013 21:58, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
I may need to update a machine's innards, so I'd like to know - did you basically just put the old hard drive on the new motherboard & case etc and it booted, just like that, without having to reinstall anything?
I can't comment on what Peter did, but generally speaking I've always found that a disk from a Linux PC will transfer to new hardware without issue. The biggest potential problem that I can think of would be a change to graphics hardware, but even then unless you have a customer X config it should just work itself out.