Recovering from "corrupt" system: How could I have done this better?

[Hayzr]

So my system went down, I suspect it was when one of the fan blades broke and jammed the fan, thanks 3rd world electric supply company.

I was hoping to minimize my effort in reconfiguration, but not being even remotely versed in BSD I was not hopeful. A few hours later I realized I could potentially recover my settings from the corrupted drive.

so I installed the new HDD and booted off the installation media (with the old Hdd attached), and went into a shell.

Geom disk list

Identified the crashed HDD as da0

ls /dev/da0* 

showed me the devices registered (?) under da0 (the one I was concerned with is da0sa1)

from there I went about mounting the old HDD

mkdir /home/whatever
mkdir /home/whatever2
mount /dev/da0sa1 /home/whatever

Once mounted I copied the config.xml file

cp /home/whatever/cf/conf/conf.xml /home/whatever2/

From there I went into the installation and proeceded as if new.

Once installed I downloaded the backed up config.xml file and went through the restore process to get back to my previous settings.

I am pretty sure my method was longer than necessary, but as a complete noob it worked for me, my question is "how could I have done this faster?"

[Derelict]

Pretty much by having a backup of the config ready to go. Other than that it seems like you managed pretty well.