Data extraction

[Nicholas Leippe]

DHCP (or lack thereof) may be the problem.
Just create a new network:

source box:
ip addr add 172.0.0.2/24 brd + dev eth0

target box:
ip addr add 172.0.0.3/24 brd + dev eth0

on source box:

mkdir /mnt/root
mount -o bind / /mnt/root
rsync -aX /mnt/root/ 172.0.0.3:/path/to/root/
rsync -aX /var       172.0.0.3:/path/to/var
rsync -aX /home      172.0.0.3:/path/to/home

And please, don't use samba to transfer a unix filesystem--slow, and you will 
probably lose special files and permissions (dev nodes, suid, and sticky bits 
come to mind).

A faster transfer (but more setup), would be to use tar and nc.