raw disk copying?

I have a pair of IDE hard drives and I want to do a raw copy from one to the other. I've tried a couple of different approaches so far without much luck. My first experiment was with linux where I created a PC linux boot CD and hooked my two drives up planning to just dd from one drive's raw device to the other. To my amazement, I discovered that linux does not have a raw disk I/O capability by default. I tried using the block devices, but the resulting copy was not intact. After doing a bit of searching, I discovered that there is some sort of rawio extension which allows a raw device to be associated with a block device, but it also said that dd would not work with this raw device due to buffer alignment issues vs. DMA. Go figure... My second attempt was with a NetBSD 3.0 install CD, exiting to the shell and trying dd from rwd0a to rwd1a. I know that back in the dark ages, this was possible, but apparently in these modern times things have changed. When I try to do this I receive a read only error on the /dev/rwd1a device. When the PC boots, the wdX information goes by to quickly to read and the dmesg command is not present on the install CD image. Is what I want to do possible (anymore)? Do I have to resort to purchasing Partition Magic or Ghost or something like that? Do these programs even work on raw disks which have no file system? --tnx --tom