Is there a verbose mode for dd? We copy 80GB - 200GB disks here at work and it can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 12 hours long.

The CPU is basically idle before dd is kicked off.

We can't pin point why sometimes it takes so darn long, so I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is any way to tell what stage dd is up to in it's duplication cycle.

Thanks.

Hmmmmm, it means like dd does not support more verbose user feedback...

Well, I guess, either
1) You hack the source code to put in some printf stmt
or
2) By indirectly monitor the system performance :

Fire up three consoles:
In one of them runs "watch vmstat -d"
In another one runs "top"
Then in the third one start the dd operation.

See how the statistic change and it may ring a bell.

Thanks for that. I'll check out the watch command. I've also seperated to different IDE channels. I have since discovered some settings as DMA=0 so that will be causing some serious slow down. Also trying larger block sizes.

i hacked the dd command years ago with a printf for output. i also found i get much better speed when i make the block size bigger like 1 meg or similar.
schily has a dd like program called sdd that gives the output you want.

http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/fokus-unix/sdd/

This may be far too late to be of good use, but perhaps the search spiders will pick it up and somebody else can gain from it.

Current versions of dd will type out their current record counts and such if the process receives an INFO signal (SIG number 29)

You can manipulate the KILL command to send any SIG command you wish. Here are the steps to bring up the current status of any dd operation:

First, get the PID for dd:
The process ID is the first column returned. (The full command is at the far right column, so you can tell which dd you want to send INFO to.)

Once you have that, go ahead and send the signal:
(Note: 1070 is the number you'll change to what came out from the first step.)

Viola! Check back on the terminal that's running dd and you should see the current record counts along with how much data it's transferred (in bytes) and how long it's been going.

Hope that helps!

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Thread necromancy, GO!

In fact the kill command posted above sort of works in that it produced a message, but it also killed my dd process. A little further research turned up a kill message specifically used to get dd to print status information. Again though, check your man page for dd to see if it's applicable.

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Another consideration is to use the iostat command in the sysstat package.
Use command then and you can determine how much has been written to your device in question.

The command is a more elaborate version of which does exactly what you need it to; it shows a live amount of blocks and bytes written when busy.

Thanks.
Is the syntax the same as dd?

Considering how old this thread is, it should be noted dd itself now has a progress indicator. dclfdd hasn't been maintained in a very long time.