[sclug] dd pain

[pieter claassen]

I have to regularly copy hard drives for redistribution and I have the
following peculiarities that I though somebody might shed some light on.

I just dd if=/dev/hda1 of/dev/hdd bs=4M | bs=50M (I have tried different
block sizes but they don't seem to make much difference)

I normally boot the machine from a CD distro and mount no partitions on
the drives to be copied, not even swap, but alas I find a few funny
things happen:
1. It takes either very long or not to copy. These disks as all 40GB and
the inconsistency bug me.
2. When I start the dd, I can normally see kswapd getting very active.
Even if I boot the machine in single user mode with no X.

Here are my questions:
1. Can anybody think of a practical way to see how dd is doing in terms
of progress. Unfortunately it currently only tells me on completion that
all is fine or not.
2. Why is kswapd going even if there is no swap space mounted?
3. Can anybody think of a faster more optimised and safer way to do
this? I find that sometimes I stare for minutes at the screen to make
sure that I get the "if" and "of" right, but one slip and I will be a
very sad person!

Thanks,
Pieter