[lug] Duplicating the Boot partition on a second drive

[J. Wayde Allen]

I'm currently trying to decide how I'm going to partition two hard drives
on a server I'm building, and would like to create two bootable
partitions.  My thought is that I can create a bootable root partition on
the first drive (/dev/sda1) and a similar bootable partition on the second
drive (/dev/sdb2).  I would then like to make /dev/sdb2 a copy of
/dev/sda1.  The idea being that if drive 1 fails I "should" be able to
boot the system off of drive 2.

What is the best way to copy /dev/sda1 to /dev/sdb1?  Can I just do a cp
or should I use something like dd or cpio?

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)