When replicating a system between two partitions, the thing most often missed is that you must preserve symbolic links instead of copying them as files. It's also important to preserve the ownership and permissions of files, and obscure things like the setuid bits, character and block special files, and named pipes.
I generally use this: cd /old_partition tar cf - . | (cd /new_partition; tar xvlpf -) Note the "p" flag to the extracting tar. You must be "su"-ed to root while doing this. See how each side of the pipe has a different current directory? Thanks Bruce