I am not quite sure about tar, (though it should work the same), but in the latest process of building diskless clients, I had to copy lots of root parititons. cp -a preserves links (hard/soft), preserves permissions and ownership, perserves directory tree, preserves special files (devs, sockets, etc), and thus using cp -a should work, either with cpio of a find -print result, or simply with a find ... -exec. my 2 cents :) Ofer.