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I was trying to make a backup of my hard drive last night.  I wanted to make a disk image, .vhd, using win image running in the pro mode.  The drive has several partitions on it and I want all of them to be included in the image.  The process gets to about 54% and then then win-image gives me an I/O error at, and then it gives me the address of the error. I did the same process that I always do and which I have never had a problem with.  Here is the process: I opened win zip, went to the Disk menu and then selected Create virtual hard disk image from physical hard drive.  
The window pops up with the sizes of the hard drives that it finds connected to my computer. I find my hard drive and I select it.  At the bottom left of this window I select Create fixed size virtual hard disk.  I then click ok. Another window pops up and asks me to name the disk image.  I name it and press ok and it starts to make the disk image.
My hard drive is from a laptop and is connected externally via usb.  It is an ATA drive, not SATA.  I am using Windows XP SP3. The are no other programs running.  Win-Image is version 8.1.
USB Cable is securely connected at both ends as is the internal connection to the hard drive inside the usb enclosure.
Anybody have any ideas as to whats going on?

Any help is much appreciated.
E~

Might try running scandisk (with fix everything) on the drive first. I use Ghost for imaging and sometimes it won't complete if it runs into a disk error.

Also, make seperate images for each partition/drive.

He can try that, but he said it worked always fine before. So the question is - what changed?

That usually happens when the program hits a bad sector on the hard drive.  Is there an ignore bad sectors option on WinZip?  I know Ghost has that option and I'm sure a lot of other programs do.  It will leave you with a bad file or two on the restore, but chances are, they are gone anyway...

There is only a retry button, a cancel, and  an Abort button on the error screen.  As far as the ignore bad sectors option, I will have to check that out.

I own ghost 7.0, but have never used it. Can somebody tell me what the steps are to make a disk image of the entire hard drive image including all partitions?
Is tere a better format the .vhd to save the image as?
Thanks,
Eric

The 3 partitions can be seen in windows Explorer.  There are skip and a skip all buttons that allow you to skip 1 or multiple errors and which allows the image to continue on being made.  I tried both of these, but the image still hangs at 54%.  The I/0 error is# 1117.  I tried using scan disk on each of the partitions, but it still gives me the I/0 error # 1117.  I am going to try it on another computer. If it comes up with the same error than it the problem is with the drive.  If it doesn't come up with the error then it's the motherboard in the initial computer that I used, specifically the USB buss.  Anybody else have any other ideas?

Thanks,
E~

USB drives can be finicky (especially cheap interfaces). I've had problems copying very large files (would get a 'can not write' error). But since you said it had worked before, I figured the drive/interface was ok. I'm talking about the USB interface on the external drive.

Error 1117 is usually caused by corrupt registry entries.

Corrupt registry entries can point Windows in the wrong direction when it looks for important system files.

 :103-

Still looks like a bad spot on the drive.

http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1691 (http://support.macrium.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1691)