On Wed, 28 May 2014, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Does this mean cp is not an appropriate way to copy partitions? I thought of using dd, but the partitions are not the same size, and I was not sure if this would cause problems.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
IMHO, the best choice for these kind of tasks is using bare metal recovery with tools like Mondorescue: http://www.mondorescue.org/
You can create with it a liveCD (or a USB bootable image) of the operating system filesystems, install the OS in this manner, then recover the user data (i.e. /home) using tools like rsync (even tar!) with the appropiate options.