A few notes to help out others…
1) If you are using Knoppix, at the boot line type in:
knoppix dma
this will enable dma support, which will extensively speed up the process.
2) Once you get done with the copy, the cloned partition will be the same size as the original drive….which is no good if you were going for a drive upgrade. Assuming you are using Knoppix, after the dd copy completes, go to the “K”, go to the “System” menu and select QTParted. Use this to resize the cloned partition to whatever size you need.

A few notes to help out others…
1) If you are using Knoppix, at the boot line type in:
knoppix dma
this will enable dma support, which will extensively speed up the process.
2) Once you get done with the copy, the cloned partition will be the same size as the original drive….which is no good if you were going for a drive upgrade. Assuming you are using Knoppix, after the dd copy completes, go to the “K”, go to the “System” menu and select QTParted. Use this to resize the cloned partition to whatever size you need.

i think the first 512 bytes are bootcode + (!) partitiontable, so the created partition will be overwritten.
maybe the first 446 bytes are bootcode(?)

Just wanted to say thanks and let you know that your blog helped me out. My hard drive had started making clicking noises, so I immediately shut down and bought a new hard drive on pricewatch from my wife’s computer. When I recieved it I found out that the tool I’ve used before to copy a drive doesn’t work with NTFS. That’s when I found your blog on Google. So I got the “root boot” and got to work. The dd command failed twice with an IO error, and I was about to give up when on a whim I happened to try one more time – and it gave slightly different error messages, but didn’t drop me back to the command line! 12+ hours later (I had to go to work, I don’t know when it finished) it quietly dropped me back to the command line. You weren’t kidding! It was like some kind of religious test of faith. But it worked perfectly… actually I don’t think I’ve had a hardware install go this smoothly… ever. ** Thank you for your excellent, very clear explanation. ** I showed your article to my wife to explain what I was doing and she understood and appreciated it even though she is not the computer geek I am. Thank you!

Every time I find myself having to move a system onto a new hard drive, I always scour the web for a good, free way to do this. In the end, I always end up doing it The Hard Way. Your advice will save me a lot of headaches. Thanks.

Another free program that provides status while it is copying is PartImage (http://www.partimage.org/). There is a statically linked version – which translates into not needing to copy any libraries. I’m not sure how well it will work with NTFS (I’ve only backed up linux systems which were using ext2 and reiserfs filesystems).

Partimage can be used to backup a partition over the network – just boot two minimal linux systems which have a network between them that you can start and use the partimage server for where you want the images to go and fire up the client to do the backup.

Another nice aspect of partimage is that you can backup to particular sized image files. This is handy if you want to make a copy of the hard drive as a backup, then dump those images to a set of CDs. To recover the system, you just need to boot the linux system, run partimage and restore an image file at a time. I found the best way is usually to have a second hard drive and copy all of the images to the temporary hard drive and use that to restore.

Not sure if partimage would have helped, but it is good free software (disclaimer – I’m just a happy partimage user