[oclug] dd

[Allan]

I hope someone can shed some light on using the command dd.  I've been backing 
up my system using dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdx bs=some multiple of 512.  This 
has been very useful when I have had to repair a broken partition and has 
proven very satisfactory since one drive is essentially a clone of the other.

I know that dd does a bit by bit copy.  What I don't know is if I can use dd 
to copy a partition to a different location on the same drive or to a 
differently numbered partition on another drive.

In case this is not clear, I'd like to know if the following commands will 
work.

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda5 or

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdc9.

Can someone give me some guidance on this?  Thanks in advance.

Allan