@BitFlipper
b) I tried that already with no luck

Then you did not try right! There is an example of just what you need at the link I posted. The outline of this approach would be:

QProcess ddProcess, md5sumProcess; ddProcess.setStandardOutputProcess(&md5sumProcess); ddProcess.start("sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb2 bs=4096 conv=noerror"); md5sumProcess.start("md5sum"); md5sumProcess.waitForFinished();

However, it's probably more suitable for you to issue the whole lot as a single string passed to /bin/sh or /bin/bash with the -c argument, and let it figure the | for you., as per my example earlier.

So my command changes in this function, should I build a custom string every time and pass it in as one statement?

Yes.

I always practice in terminal first

For this purpose make yourself use /bin/sh -c "sudo dd ... | md5sum" as that is what you will need. Be careful if anything in your command requires its own quoting (your current example does not), as the whole command itself is now inside quotes.

As I wrote earlier, your md5sum is not going to see the contents from the dd. Your example does not lend itself to checksumming as it uses a single dd if=... of=... which does the input & output in one go. What you want is for the output from the dd to go both to the output file and to md5sum. Here are two possibilities for you to play with:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=4096 conv=noerror | sudo tee /dev/sdb2 | md5sum sudo dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=4096 conv=noerror | tee >(md5sum 1>&2) | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb2 bs=4096

In the first case we tee the output off to /dev/sdb2 as well as letting it through to md5sum. Simpl-ish, but you lose the ability to specify the bs= for the output to /dev/sdb2. I don't know if that matters to you.

In the second case you use "shell magic" (you'll probably have to use /bin/bash not /bin/sh, I think) to send tee's output to md5sum process as well as passing it onto a second dd to do the output. I have made it so md5sum's output goes to standard error instead of standard output.

Finally: is all this dd and checksum stuff worth it? Probably not. Have a read of, say, https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/45854/104736 for alternative suggestions.