Is dd ok?

[Klaus-Peter Schrage]

My wife's got an old IBM 350 MHz PII machine with a 6 G IDE harddisk. It 
is partinioned for dual booting with Grub to Win98 SE and RH 9 (which, 
alas, she uses very rarely - she's quite content with the few apps she 
uses in Win98: Winword, Excel, Mozilla mail and browser).

As you might imagine, diskspace is running short sooner or later with 
such a setup on 6 G, so we bought a new 40 G harddisk which I plugged in 
as secondary master in order to copy over the entire stuff. As the disk 
was rather cheap and I was rather daring, I booted my knoppix cd, 
checked if /dev/hdc was recognized and gave:
	dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc.
dd buzzed for about one and a half hour, and after it had finished I was 
rather surprised to have all the partitions copied from hda to hdc, no 
error messages, and all fscks were ok.

After I had removed the old disk and put the new one in place, there was 
Grub, I could boot into either OS without any difference (only quite a 
lot faster due to the new disk).

Now, has this been TOO easy? I found nothing on the net about doing such 
a foolish thing or any caveats (differing geometries etc.).

Klaus