dd With Progress Bar 2.0

many of you might remember my first article about this. It was written in 2009 and by the looks of it is somewhat outdated.

What is dd?

dd is an application to make bit for bit copies of a hard drive, or anything else you need a bit for bit copy of. One of dd’s downfalls is that it doesn’t have a progress bar. Instead you are just staring at a blank screen, waiting for dd to finish copying your drive.

Today I ran into this problem again, I am copying a 80GB hard drive bit for bit.  I need this copy to turn the server it was in into a virtual server.  Saving me electricity and hardware.

Yeah so how do you do this with a progress bar?  Especially since the newer versions of dcfldd don’t have a progress bar anymore?

The solution is quite simple we just have to pipe through another application to get the progress bar.  Before we do anything install this application.  Here is the code:

sudo apt-get install pv

Now we have that application installed we just need to change the dd command to include this application:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdd | pv | sudo dd of=/home/username/path-to-iso.iso

That’s it I can’t make it any easier than that.

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