https://askubuntu.com/questions/215505/how-do-you-monitor-the-progress-of-dd You can monitor the progress of dd once it's running without halting it by using the kill command to send a signal to the process. After you start dd, open another terminal and enter either: sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd$) Or, if you're on BSD or OS X: sudo kill -INFO $(pgrep ^dd$)