I have not used dd or any other imaging when I do closing because there
may be some differences for each system. The system name is one thing
that
changes. Also, some may have fixed IP addresses. Further, I have had to
clone the same environment onto different sized disks and partitions.
Here is what I have been doing; this worked on Debian, Suse, Red Hat,
and
other distros:
1. Set up your working master system; the one with the
configuration you want to duplicate
2. Shut that system down, install the disk to which you
want to clone the system
3. Use fdisk to set up the partitions on that disk
4. Use mkfs to set up the empty file systems
5. Ensure the system is in run state 1 (least going on in
the system
6. mount each of the new partitions
7. Do a 'cp -ax /