copying/cloning root partition

["Stephen A. Witt" <sawitt@electra.rsc.raytheon.com>]

I'm trying to figure out how to clone the root partition of a Debian Linux
installation. The installation is pretty small and hosted on a small,
PC-104 based system that has only a root partition and runs without swap.
I would like to be able to "clone" its root partition onto other disks but
am running into a problem. I installed the disk from the PC-104 system in
another regular desktop machine and tried to copy the image of the PC-104
system using:

  # dd bs=512 if=/dev/hdc1  of=disk.image

I then tried to copy this new image onto another disk of the same type as
running in the PC-104 system using (obviously installed in the desktop
machine):

  # dd bs=512 if=disk.image of=/dev/hdc1

The partition image gets copied fine, but when I go to boot up this copied
disk (after being re-installed in one of the PC-104 systems) it doesn't
finish booting. I see "LIL- " when booting the PC-104 system. This,
according to the LILO docs indicates that the descriptor table is corrupt,
caused by a geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/map without running
/sbin/lilo.

I'm confused by this as it seems that the low level copy with 'dd' should
copy everything. Any ideas??

Thanks...