Cloning LinuxCNC - Axis and Mesa 7196s

I'm putting together my third LinuxCNC system. Using Axis and a Mesa 7i96s

This one will be an almost direct copy of a previous installation I did for my small lathe, this time for a new lathe.

To get started I ran the PCNConf wizard skipping over some of the configuration just to get to the point where LinuxCNC will launch.

Now I'm hoping to simply substitute in a copy of the hal files from my old installation (basically replace the hal files PcnConf made with my old tried and true hal files).

Does this sound like a viable plan?

Possible wrinkles:
One possible wrinkle is that I needed more I/O on the previous 7i96s and I did some sort of "firmware upgrade" to the 7i96s to get more encoders via the expansion port so I will need to do that again. need to see if I can find my notes for that. Also not sure if the old upgrade file is still viable?

Both setups use a Lenovo Yoga, however the latest one  (Chromebook C340) requires a USB-C to dock to get an Ethernet connection. I picked up a dock from Amazon (UGREEN) and have managed to get the Mesa card recognized by LinuxCNC but the mouse (also connected to the dock) seems to go to sleep (often) and I have changed the power saving setting to stop this, but they don't seem to be preventing mouse sleeps. My concern is that the entire dock might be going to sleep including the Ethernet port.

Any advice is welcome.

There was no need to even run PNCconfig. You can simply copy the whole config directory from the old machine to the new machine.