Cloning Linux hard drives with the dd command.  (Paul W. 10/11/07) 

1. Source drive should be master on ide1 interface.  Target should be master on ide2 interface.
2. Boot with Linux Live CD or boot floppy (e.g. Toms RtBt)
3. Fdisk the target drive to match the source's first partition in size or be larger than source's
   first partition. (I have not tested, but suspect the target's first partition really only needs
   to be a little larger than the amount of used space on the source drive's first partition.)
4. Reboot (with same boot disk) so the partion changes take effect.
5. Be sure neither source or target drive are mounted.
6. Type this command:   dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdc1 bs=1048576
   (bs=  option can be the size of your choice)  This process may take quite a while depending on the size
   of your disks.  My 2gig disks took roughly 15 minutes.
7. Now to copy the MBR type this:  dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1
8. Power down and remove source disk from ide1 interface.  Move target disk to the ide1 interface.
9. Because my source disk was using the grub boot loader I had to do this:  boot up one more time with the
   Linux boot disk.
10. Make a directory and mount /dev/hda1 to it. (e.g.  mkdir /mnt/hda1  then  mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1)
11. Now re-initialize grub with the chroot command:
    a. chroot /mnt/hda1 grub
    b. from the grub prompt type:
       1. find /boot/grub/stage1    [e.g. output  (hd0,0) ]
       2. root (hdo,0)
       3. setup (hd0)
12. Remove the Linux boot disk, reboot and that should do it if there were no errors along the way.