I was looking at following the instructions in this serverfault question for restoring a backup of a server to new hardware. I am a little bit confused by the whole process and have a few specific questions that I would really like answered.
If the backup procedure as defined was followed would this be manifestly the same as taking the physical drive out and putting it in the target machine?
What happens with differing hardware devices, does any hardware not present in the original need to be set up manually after the backup restore on the target machine?
What is the issue with doing a clean bare install and copying over with a full backup of the old system?
Why is copying the MBR and partition table an important step?
Finally, I would really like to just keep all the installed programs and configuration (including stuff like apache, bind etc) when moving to new hardware and have an installer deal with the OS and driver issues. Is this at all feasible?
Thanks