cannot backup sata drive with dd

[Kevin Kempter]

Hi List;

I'm running FC5 on a thinkpad laptop with an internal SATA drive and a second 
drive adapter (a smart drive tray or some such marketing hype) which holds a 
second SATA drive. The CD drive is removable and I can insert the second 
drive. 

With this configuration I booted into single user mode (init 1) and ran:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hdc

after about an hour I always get this:
IPW2200 firmware error detected, restarting

after that every few minutes the error is repeated and the dd never finishes.

Thanks in advance for any help/advice