Transferring my install to new computer

[p.echols at comcast.net]

Greetings all:

I have 10.4 LTS on my ASUS eeepc netbook.  It now has a power problem and will not boot.  The hard drive is fine.  

At the moment I need to be out of town in a few days and cannot wait for the parts to repair and I MUST have a functioning laptop.  I have a acer aspire 5100 I could take on my trip.  Ideally I want all my existing install to be on that machine.  I have two options:

(1) I can install 10.04 (or 12.04 which I was planning at some point) and restore my /home from backup.  The only loss would be a day worth of email that did not make the backup.

(2) I could install the hard drive from the netbook into the laptop and boot it.  

I know that the first will work, and is the safer bet.  The real question is if #2 will work?  Please assume that the hard drives are compatible.  Obviously I will have to confirm this.  But will an existing installation boot on completely different hardware?  If so, would there be things I need to do to make it work properly?

Thanks

--PE