I have these little 256mb flash drives that plug into the ide port on the motherboard. i need to get make an image of one and write it to another. These flash drives are running what i believe to be Venix 2.0 (the filesystem is Venix 80286 (id 40)), I've made a couple images of the drive using
dd if=/dev/hdc of=venix.img

and

cat /dev/hdc > venix.img

after i make the images i then try to put put them on the new drive using
dd if=/venix.img of=/dev/hdc

but no matter which version of the image i use, i get this error:
dd: writing to `/dev/hdc': Input/output error
499969+0 records in
499968+0 records out

anyone have a clue why i cant copy this image to the new drive?

The message you got has the answer:

499969+0 records in
499968+0 records out

Your device is one of the "off by 1" storage devices that have been mentioned on the kernel mailing lists (i.e., the devices lies).

You can put the files back by loopback mounting the image and recursively copying file-by-file (after formatting the device, if necessary).