Copying an installation?

[aquavitae]

This is my setup: Desktop PC with Ubuntu and a fairly new installation of Arch on it. Ancient laptop with Feisty Xubuntu on it. The trouble is, that even with a very stripped down xubuntu using fluxbox its still very slow on my old laptop. I know it will go faster because I had gentoo on it at one stage, but all the compiling was too slow. So now I want to try it with Arch. Next problem: The laptop's cdrom is really dodgy. I spent two days coaxing it before I manager to install feisty, and its not the drive, its something on the motherboard because I've tried a number of other drives. It also won't boot off usb. So my idea was to somehow copy the installation through nfs from my desktop pc to the laptop, probably using dd, but there are problems with that too. The laptop's hard drive is only 3Gb - not enough for two partitions, so what's nfs running off if I wipe the drive? Also, I'd presumably need to reinstall grub - difficult if I have no way of booting.

Any ideas on how I can copy Arch across to this laptop?

[mips]

Take the drive out of the laptop connect it to the pc via a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (cheap) and install or mirror it on there is all I can think of.

[aquavitae]

Yes, I could do that - just need to get the adapter. But I was really just wondering whether copying it would work?