How best to copy the entire contents of one partition to another?

[Josef Lowder]

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?