Hmmm... One of the reasons I responded was that my understanding, based on what I've been able to find, is somewhat contradictory.

For example, from http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/ddcommand.htm

Using dd you can create backups of an entire harddisk or just a parts of it. This is also usefull to quickly copy installations to similar machines. It will only work on disks that are exactly the same in disk geometry, meaning they have to the same model from the same brand.

full hard disk copy

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy
dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image
dd if=/dev/hdx | gzip > /path/to/image.gz

Hdx could be hda, hdb etc. In the second example gzip is used to compress the image if it is really just a backup.
So if I understand that, copying a 300GB IDE Maxtor using dd would require me to purchase another set of 300GB IDE Maxtors. Am I mistaken?

Thanks again,

Seth