In my case I needed to move a machine from a headless box to an ESXi server. The VMWare tool does not support software raid.
I started by installing the OS on the new box with the same partition layout. This takes care of all of the mbr and boot stuff. The critical part, though, is / with the configuration, installed programs and any amount of data. I used nc to do this and did it very painlessly.
#server you’re sending files to
nc -l 1024 > backup4.tgz#client you’re backing up
tar -cvpz –one-file-system / | nc neon.imaginenetworksllc.com 1024#boot the new box aka new client with a linux live cd and mount the partition
mkdir /mnt/sda3
mount /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3
nc -l 1024 | tar -xvpzf – -C /mnt/sda3#on that backup server
cat backup4.tgz | nc NEW.BOX.COM 1024
In my case I just installed the OS on the box so it had grub and the boot partition all done. What makes this box is the files in /.
Moving from ext3 partitions on md0 devices directly to sda1 I have to tell it to mount correctly.
*/etc/fstab
*eth0.bak has the ip config
*nload was nice to monitor network usage
*lots of help from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/TAR