PC Locks up while creating Full Disk Image (booted from USB Flash Drive) TI Home 2010

I recently purchased TI Home 2010 and used it to create a bootable USB Flash Drive. I booted my laptop using the bootable flash drive and started a full disk image to an external USB harddrive. The process took a while to get started, but then seemed to finish OK (I did not sit an watch it the whole time, but came back and it was back to the menu screen in Acronis). However, when I tried to close TI by clicking on the "X" in the upper right corner, the machine was locked up. Everything I tried just resulted in no response or a single "beep". There was no activity lights on the flash drive, the laptop, or the external USB harddrive.

I rebooted (again from the flash drive) and tried it again (this time I also turned on "Validate Archive After Creating Image") and had the same results.

I booted up Windows (running Win7 64 bit Home Premium) and plugged in the external USB harddrive. I selected the first archive file and right-clicked and selected "Archive" then "Validate". The process started and then failed in a matter of 30 seconds or so. The log entry indicated that the "archive is corrupted".

My suspicion is that the problem is related to the locked-up state my laptop was in after "finishing" the archive creation. I can't find anything on the forums here that seems related to this. Any thoughts? I have not tried changing any of the startup parameters that are available when you create the bootable USB flash drive--I don't know if any of these might help, but there are literally thousands of combinations to try, so I am hoping to avoid that.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.