Here’s a bitch – the logic board failed on my mom’s ibook and I was supposed to take it in and ship it off to apple today, but I can’t get the drive imaged. And it’s because there is a bug in the 10.3.9 update that I held off installing until last night, just so that in case there were any bugs that I didn’t want to have to deal with… thanks murph.
The problem seems to come from a bug in the Disk Utilities framework that was updated with 10.3.9. This brought the version of Disk Utility up to 10.4.4 from 10.4.3. The bug occurs if the source volume you try to create is over 8Gb. Creating a image from this drive will guarantee failure regardless if you try to do a compressed or uncompressed image.