[dnanian]

macnatic -- the forums here are probably not the best place to handle support with attachments and stuff, as they're available to everyone who browses -- not necessarily what you'd want.

That said, it sounds like your drive is failing, which is why the I/O subsystem is hanging during the copy. I can't see any errors in your system.log, though, so it's hard to know for sure: you might want to open Console and view the system log during the backup operation to see if it starts spitting out failures.

Anyway, what I'd try first is to:

- Use Disk Utility to erase *AND ZERO* the external drive
- Simplify the bus completely -- detaching everything but the USB drive and reboot
- Open console and view the system.log
- Try the backup again

Let me know what happens!