[dnanian]

When you get something like "Bad File Descriptor", it usually means that the drive you're copying to has failed. I don't have much to go on here, but what brand of drive is it? FireWire or USB? Anything else at all on the FireWire bus?

If it's a sparse image, it's possible that the destination volume is a FAT32 drive, rather than HFS+. In that case, it's because of limitations in FAT32 discussed in the User's Guide: there's a 4GB file limit.

Hope that helps a bit, DRAD; with additional information, I'll do my best to assist further.