Error Message - any ideas?

I was doing a backup to an external drive with SuperDuper and after the preliminaries finished the backup aborted with the following message:-
| 01:04:13 PM | Info | WARNING: Caught I/O exception(5): Input/output error
| 01:04:13 PM | Info | WARNING: Source: /Users/peter/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Home Edition.vmwarevm/Windows XP Home Edition-000001.vmdk, lstat(): 0
| 01:04:13 PM | Info | WARNING: Target: /Volumes/iMac backup 2/Users/peter/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Home Edition.vmwarevm/Windows XP Home Edition-000001.vmdk, lstat(): 0
| 01:04:13 PM | Info | Attempting to copy file using copyfile().
| 01:04:15 PM | Info | Attempting to copy file using ditto.
| 01:10:13 PM | Info | The target volume is no longer available.
| 01:10:13 PM | Info | Failed to recover from copy error for file /Users/peter/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Home Edition.vmwarevm/Windows XP Home Edition-000001.vmdk
| 01:10:13 PM | Error | SDCopy: Failed to recover from copy error for file /Users/peter/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized/Windows XP Home Edition.vmwarevm/Windows XP Home Edition-000001.vmdk
| 01:10:13 PM | Error | : Operation not supported

Any ideas about this please?

Thanks

Was VMWare running at the time? It looks as if the virtual disk file for your WIndowsXP VM disappeared when SuperDuper was about to back it up.

Thanks - I tried running SuperDuper again, backing up only files in the 'home' folder and it ran smoothly. I thought my virtual partition might have been corrupt but it ran fine. So... ?

I don't run VMWare, I use Parallels; and I don't back up the virtual machines because I keep all my Windows user data in shared folders in my Mac Home folder and take occasional snapshots of the virtual machine itself.

So I have no idea whether VMWare does strange things to its hard drive image files. But I thought that, if it was running, it might have renamed the virtual disk file, or made it unavailable to SuperDuper temporarily. This could look like an intermittent fault.