[CentOS] moving accounts with permissions.

Hello,
    I've got an old fc3 box being retired. I've got 5 accounts on the old
box i have to move to the new one. This machine is CentOs 4.2. I don't have 
the user's passwords and
don't want to crack the shadow file to get them. So, i went through the old
passwd, shadow, and group file, and got out the relevant parts, then i
copied those files over to the new box to a tempoary location. Then i did a
cat < oldpasswd,shadow,group files to the new files. This worked without a
problem. Then i used scp -Cpqr * on /home which got all the data. So far, so
good. The problem is permissions were not transfered and i thought that was
the point of -p for scp. Did i miss something is there a command i have to
use for the new box to pick up the permissions from the old box?
Thanks.
Dave.