I attempted to clone a fully functional IA-32 SL 6.1 system to a new 
harddrive of the same storage size as the original;
  dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

The operation worked, and the cloned drive in the target machine booted, 
but two issues emerged.

1.  The source and clone platforms had different 802.11 WNICs, the 
source Atheros, the clone Intel.  The kernel still claimed it had a 
non-existant Atheros wlan0 about which it complained and installed the 
Intel as wlan1.

2.  The shutdown GUI app, whether initiated by the power button on the 
physical hardware or via the GUI pull down menu, always would do a 
restart even if shutdown was selected.  From a regular GUI terminal as 
root via su, shutdown now eventually followed by halt worked as 
expected.  I know that there has been a change in the controlling 
hardware and thus software (e.g., acpi, whatever), and the cloned image 
clearly was expecting new hardware.

I did a fresh install from the SL 6.1 IA-32 DVD into only / /boot and 
/usr, not touching any other partitions not needed for the install, and 
now everything appears to work as expected.

In the (distant) past, I recall that the kernel startup did an inventory 
of the actual hardware on the platform, and installed the correct 
drivers/interfaces for the physical platform upon which the environment 
was to run (assuming these were supported by the distribution image -- 
if not, a manual merry chase over the web had to be made for source 
and/or binary RPMs that provided the drivers/interfaces).  It appears 
that some of these drivers/interfaces are now configured by the original 
systems installer (anaconda plus whatever anaconda uses), and not 
modified/replaced during startup -- making cloning to slightly different 
platforms more difficult.  Where/which are the various configuration 
files that one needs to modify (I had a fully functional vi and disk 
reading/writing capability) so that one can manually force the 
environment to use the correct drivers for the hardware platform? 
Appropriate document URL(s) will suffice.

Yasha Karant