the problem is the following. I have an old computer that mounts a SATA Dvd Burner. The old MoBo (an AsRock P4VT8+) is not able to recognize the freaking burner when booting. So I had to convert my IDE HD to USB HD and mount it on my laptop and install Ubuntu from there. The problem now is that I'm obviously getting kernel panic every now and then so I was wondering if it is possibile to rerun only the system and the hardware configuration.
UPDATE: I'm getting kernel panics once I moved the IDE HD back.
changing IDE / USB changes HDD name
as IDE your HDD name is /dev/hdXY as USB is /dev/sdXY
you need to boot from a live CD and chroot to your disk, change sd with hd in /etc/fstab
you need to update grub configuration
The system would have been setup with drivers etc specific to the laptop, and not that desktop, which is why it is likely to be having trouble. Redoing the configure steps as you suggested is no trivial matter - a world of much manual reading and web searching, as well as probably a chroot operation from a live CD, IF you can use the live CD on the target machine.
If the target machine refuses to recognize the burner, perhaps you could make a bootable USB stick from an Ubuntu LiveCD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
This means you wouldn't need to depend on the burner and should be able to install on the target machine without moving the drive.