The background to this is here

I think the CD drive is at fault and think I've found one on ebay.

But, if the worst comes to the worst, is it possible to install on to one machine, pull the hard drive, pop it in the other box and get the autodetection to run again?

I seem to remember someone doing something like this in order to get a new peice of hardware recognised...................

Ideas welcomed. I'll be using Kanotix 2005 4.