As I described here, I exchanged my laptop with my mom's. For sure I don't want to reinstall anything from scratch and then reconfigure the new GNU/Linux installation. So, what I did was to boot my old laptop with a GNU/Linux live CD, turned off the swap partition in the hard drive that the live CD is using with `swapoff', and dumped the image of the whole hard drive (/dev/sda) to an external USB hard drive (/media/disk/hd.bin) by firing:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/disk/hd.bin bs=20M

Afterwards, I booted the new laptop with the GNU/Linux live CD, turned off the swap partition in the hard drive that the live CD is using with `swapoff', and dumped the image to the hard drive of the new laptop by firing:

sudo dd if=/media/disk/hd.bin of=/dev/sda bs=20M

Less than an hour I got my old system working fine in the new machine. This can be a useful technique for backing up your entire machine for a very quick restoration as well.

Note that the technique cannot move Microsoft Windows from one machine to another since the brand new hardware configuration of the new machine will screw it up unless the machine is quite the same. However, the technique can be used for a complete machine back-up regardless of the operating systems.