Best Method to Transfer a SharePoint Site From one SP install to another

It depends on what you're planning to achieve.

If you're going to have a small farm with small quantity of users, then this is something you don't have to take in consideration. However, when you're deploying a really large farm you should pay attetion to software boundaries.

As you can see in this Technet Article Plan for Software Boundaries, SharePoint degrades performance exponentially when certain things are not taken into account.

I would suggest you pay attetion to these performance issues, rather than site collections. Site Collections have their pro's and con's, however when you're working with large farms (100GB+), Microsoft suggests to use a single site collection and quotas for content databases. Hope this helps.

-Máximo

The basic steps are:

1. Create a new web application in your new WSS server.
2. Follow the instructions in Move content databases between instances of SQL Server.

However you may not be able to perform all of the steps exactly as written if your previous server farm is not available. The main thing is that you get the most recent backup of the databases restored on your SQL Server, then follow these steps from the linked article:

13. In Central Administration, on the Application Management page, in the SharePoint Web Application Management section, click Content databases.

14. On the Manage Content Databases page, click Add a content database.

15. On the Add Content Database page, type the exact name of the transferred content database, and then click OK.

16. Repeat steps 14 and 15 for each database you are adding. Be sure that you select the correct Web application from the Web Application menu for each database.

I don't know your farm topology but if you are sharing the same SQL Server used for the dead server farm, make sure that the dead farm is completely powered off. You don't want two different SharePoint farms accessing the same data (especially if one is in an inconsistent state).