[dnanian]

Not really, no. What you're going to want to do is ensure both computers have the exact same version of the OS, and make sure that version is at least as late as the one that shipped with the computer.

Once that's done, you can do a "direct copy", should you want.

But it seems to me that you'd be better off copying to an external drive that you could *boot* the computer from, rather than going directly to the destination drive of the computer itself. Up to you, of course!