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of course

dd has a progress indicator, it shows itself when hit with the USR1 signal it's an easy way to see how far along you are, usage: `kill -USR1 `pidof dd`` running that in a sepearte terminal should cause dd to spit out information about how far and how fast it's running

you may also consider ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html) which is a bit of a change to regular dd which comes with a decent enough progress indicator by default and a means to try and get at hosed disks in case you ever drop your apple tv.

as far as partioning freely you might use any number of free live cds say for instance one from Ubuntu and use gparted. As a bonus all tools dd, ddrescue, and gparted would likely be found on said live cds.