It would be nice if you could just copy the metabase file from one IIS box to another to make a clone of your web server. Unfortunately this doesn’t work because the metabase contains some settings like ACLs and GUIDS of security principles that are specific to the machine where the metabase file resides.
Fortunately there is a way to do this in IIS 6: back up the metabase on your old machine and restore it to your new one. That’s because the backup/restore process is smart enough to know how to handle the machine-specific information in the metabase–almost. You also need to make sure you have the same directories and the same user accounts on the new machine to make it work.
