How best to copy the entire contents of one partition to ano…

I need to try to resintall Mandriva 2006 because the one I've
been screwing around with for nearly a month is apparently
all messed up. It is on partition hda6.

But in doing this, I want to make sure that my /home directory
(which is on a separate partition, hda7) is protected. I do have
a dvd backup of /home, but as an added precaution, I would like
to copy the entire contents of /home (on hda7) to another unused
partition (hda8). Would the following be the correct command to
do this. With both hda7 and hda8 mounted, as root:

    cp -pr /mnt/hda7 /mnt/hda8 

Or is there another or better way to do this?
I've heard of but never used 'dd' ... is that something that might
be better to use in some way?


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