Your running into cross platform issues... If I am reading this correctly.
Can you please verify that I am following the multiple threads here?
1 - The drive your trying to copy onto is a Mac OS Extended formatted disk?
2 - The disk you are trying to read is a NTFS or Fat32 Windows XP system disk
It sounds like your running into a filename incompt. issue. For example, on the Mac you can have a filename of "this is a great/\filename". But if you copy that to a PC, it'll freak out, and probably create a subdirectory (the ).
Same thing on the PC to Mac side, there a few characters that don't transfer well. It's less common on the Mac, because they have less restrictive filenames. But for example, don't use "::" as a filename...
My suggestion is to use the right tool... Download Winclone, and use that to clone the disk to a disk image... 1, it'll be compressed, 2, you can open the disk image, and retrieve any specific files you need, when you need them. 3, you can always clone the image, to a disk drive, if you want to boot from it...