[gentoo-user] Best way to copy /* ?

[Marc Blumentritt]

Hi,

I have bought myself a Christmas present, a new shiny hard disk. Now I
want to copy my old Gentoo system to my new disk like this:

1.) boot with gentoo boot cd
2.) mount my old system ind /old ( / in one partition, /home, /usr,
/var, /tmp and /opt in lvm2 volumes and /boot on it's own partition)
3.) mount my new disk ind /new (just 2 partitions, 1 for / and 1 for /boot)
4.) copy from /old to /new
5.) modify fstab and prepare grub
6.) reboot

Concerning step 4: what is the best copy command?
I tried with

cp -a /old/* /new

but got some problems in /home. My user dir got the wrong permissions (I
d'ont know, if this is in some way connected with /home being a mount
point). Of course this could be the same in other dirs.

Is there a better method? I read years ago on this list about using tar
with this (piping the tar output into a second tar command, which
extracts the files to their final destination).

Are there other tools? Or did I use cp in a wrong way?

Regards
Marc