dd has progress built in, under Linux it is kill -USR1 <pid> to get a progress report, the signal varies by OS. cp has a -v option, if tahts not enough rsync has a --progress option too that gives within file progress.
If anybody is using dd to rescue a failing drive, I can very much recommend using the spectactular ddrescue instead.
I had a 2TB drive turn up five figure error rates (Raw Read Error rate ended up at 90k - when I started, it was already no longer possible to mount it, but it did show up in /dev) and thought I had lost an entire year of family pictures (mea culpa on not having a backup, of course). It took four months, 24/7 of meticulous work, but it ended up giving me a near perfect copy to an identical drive (save for ~20kb of truly dead sectors).
Amongst many other features, it has a logfile where it keeps track of the overall process - so that it can be killed or paused and restarted later.
