B&R 2011 crashes during BU at same point

I've used Paragon's 2010 for about a year with no problems until now. Upgraded to 2011 thinking that may solve problem. I have 2 internal IDE HD's each partitioned 4 ways. Backup is to a WD 500Gb external USB . All drives pass a CHKDSK screening.
When running a 0 Drive backup (the only drive with important data) it gets to about the 5Gb point on the backup drive and system reboots. It will remain stuck in this reboot state until the external drive is unpluged from the USB port then it comes to ready at the Windows XP screen. Also have XP at SP3 level. This system has worked fine until recently (regarding backups) The External drive has been tested using NTFS format and returned to FAT32 with no change in performance. Any thoughts?

 

Are you saying that both B&R 10 and 2011 behave the same way?

Is this the only partition that fails in this manner or do the others as well?

How are you doing the chkdsk command: you should be using /r which also does a read-check of the entire partition, even the un-used sectors. Do the test for every partition including the USB drive.

Is the external USB drive the same one you have used with no problems earlier?

Look in the Windows Event Logger and see it Windows is reporting any strange behaviour when you are running. Also check for any problems identified particularly with the disks at the time you started the PC.

If you are using Paragon in Windows, boot up the recovery CD and see how creating the image with it works. This will take your Windows configuration out of the picture but it doesn't rule out possible hardware issues even if it works.

A bad RAM location can cause strange things. You could run Memtest86+ free from www.memtest.org for several passes. Overnight is best; you should have zero errors.