What was the filesystem on the pata drive?
Also, if you send the USR1 signal to dd, it will print out its progress.
Because you need root access to access the device, you need to use sudo to run the dd command as root.
You also need to use "sudo killall -s SIGUSR1 dd" to get the progress output.
Code:
sudo killall dd -s USR1
jschiwal@hpamd64:~> 2141905+0 records in
2141904+0 records out
1096654848 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 138.023 s, 7.9 MB/s
jschiwal@hpamd64:~> sudo killall dd -s USR1
jschiwal@hpamd64:~> 2619857+0 records in
2619856+0 records out
1341366272 bytes (1.3 GB) copied, 164.08 s, 8.2 MB/s
The filesystem on the drive you are saving the backup on needs to be able to store files larger than 2GB. So don't save to a vfat external drive unless you also pipe the output through the split command to break up the output to more manageable slices. You can use cat to reassemble them and pipe the output through gunzip. You don't need to reassemble a large 10GB file. You could even use par2create to create parity files to protect the backup.
If this a backup after your initial installation? It is better to backup files instead of the entire partition. Although an initial image backup is fine. You might want to look at the kdar program. It makes routine backups easy. You can export a script from kdar that performs the same backup, and have it run daily in a cron job.