Exactly this. But I was looking for something a novice could do. And that includes the thing you boot into to run whatever command you need. The whole chain.

I've decided that I'm going to make a bootable Leap image with kiwi that contains a couple potential packages to do this. And of course 'dd' will be one of them. I will then be certain that nothing unexpected is done to any disks found in the system. Which is what my user claims happened after using clear linux to do this. What I'm trying to figure out is where best to store the image. kiwi has some flexibility on how the ISO image (the one you boot with to do all this) fills the media it first boots on. So making a partition for those images is possible.