A tip for dd: get a progress report
Many have been the times when I wished the dd utility gave progress messages. It's annoying to be some unknown percentage through some gigantic operation. Somehow, despite the fact that I must have read the help a million times, I never noticed that there was a way to do this. Maybe you didn't either.
Don't get me wrong -- I still think dd is the wrong tool for the job in many of its present day applications, and we'd all seriously benefit from a (simple!) new tool meant largely for working with disks and disk images. But a little progress information goes a long way to making dd more palatable. 
To get a progress message from dd, just send it a USR1 signal:
dd if=giant-disk.img of=/dev/hdb & pid=$! kill -USR1 $pid
If you're not familiar with "$!", this handy little variable gets set with the PID of process the shell most recently started. You could also have just gotten the PID with, e.g., "ps -C dd".
As a sidenote: don't try this under busybox -- it'll just kill dd (yet another way for busybox to drive me crazy... ah well, it is what it is).