fuseblower,

Welcome to Justlinux.

On the difficulty of find a Linux to fit a modern mobo I seem to have the opposite effect of not able to find a distro that cannot be loaded into my PC, which is a Abit AW9D Max with Core Duo E6700. I run nothing but Sata II disk as internal and external eSata disks. The only thing I keep away is Raid.

dd operates at the hardware level between devices. Thus I can clone a raw disk directly from a new purchase without the need to mount it. A user does not need to mount any partition to use the dd command.