You don't need special commands, the ones you already have will work quite fine. Linux gives you special files for partitions that you can use the same way you use the special files it gives you for disks. I'd always use dd instead of cp for copying whole drives or partitions but GNU cp is apparently smart enough to handle nearly anything.

For the record, copying from disk A partition 1 to disk B partition 1:

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 conv=noerror,sync
# I'd reccomend dd over cp, dd can be told to not die on bad sectors as in above
# cp /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

The "conv=noerror,sync" is something important that cp does not have as far as I know... in the case of error, it will skip that sector in the input and write a sector full of zeroes on the output. cp would probably just stop on any errors. That's what I'd think. knoppix could, yes. Though a full-on graphical interface is probably overkill. I prefer Gentoo liveCDs, or those old little Redhat sysadm disks. ...apparently it does. I did not know that. The input file is specified with the "if=something", and the output file is specified with "of=something". If they are not given, they are assumed to be standard input and standard output. the "bs=512" tells it to assume 512 bytes per sector. The count=1 tells it to copy one and ONLY one sector. So, it copies the first and ONLY the first sector from the hard drive to file. tadah!