Topic: Copying an unknown partition
Since I've started dipping my toes into Linux lately, when Partition Magic refused to copy an unknown partition type (happened to be a TrueCrypt partition) I tried the gparted that ships with Ubuntu 7.04 (people here keep suggesting that they used some really old, buggy version of gparted: is this true, and if so why on earth did they?).
But that too refused to allow the copy operation. I can understand why a partition manager needs to be familiar with the associated file system (or other internal structure) if it's resizing a partition, and why it might like to understand these internals during a copy operation in order to copy no more than it actually needs to, but to refuse outright to copy a partition of unknown internal format (rather than just copy every byte) seems a bit unreasonable.
I suppose I could work around the problem by using a TrueCrypt container file within a dedicated partition, but the addition of an extra level of otherwise unnecessary mapping seems silly. Am I just missing some means by which gparted would perform the copy, or some reason why it really can't?
Thanks.