Error Code -36 While Writing to External Drive

Question

I have a 2.16GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro with the 100GB 7200 RPM HDD and 1GB 667 RAM. I am trying to use my MBP with a Western Digital 250GB MyBook Essential external HDD connected via USB 2.0.
The external HDD used to be formatted with FAT32 (I was unaware) and I could read and write small files to the drive with no problem. However, when I tried to copy my iTunes folder to the drive (21.7 GB) I would always get an error soon after the transfer began. The error message reads:
The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "08 Bottle of Blues.mp3" could not be read or written. (Error Code -36).
The message will always come up on the same file. If I delete the file mentioned in the error message, the error will still come up after about the same amount of time has elapsed, but just on a different file.
Recently, I learned that the external drive was FAT32 so I formatted it with Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I still get the same error.
I have tried using Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0b5 and SuperDuper! 2.1.4 and neither application can complete the transfer--using the Mac OS Extended file system. CCC gives me the error:
15:45:02 Error: asr: could not copy /./Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app/Contents/Resources/no.lproj/ScriptEditorHelp/gfx/sedebug.jpg; Input/output error
15:45:02
15:45:02
15:45:05 ccc.sh: The restore operation failed, Error code: 98
SuperDuper! gives me the error:
| 04:00:49 PM | Error | ditto: /Users/caseyhancock/.Trash/Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive/Office/Fonts/./MS Mincho.ttf: Input/output error
AppleCare support hasn't been able to help me, and I feel like I've searched exhaustively for information about Error Code -36. If anyone could shed some light on my problem and help me backup/copy files to this external HDD I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance.
MBP 15" 2.16 1GB 100GB 7200RPM   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

In my experience, it was a BAD EXTERNAL DRIVE...
sometimes they are bad (and the one I had was a external USB 120 GB Western Digital) due to fall, or something, and you can format and they work, but they have a place on the disk that is just bad, and freezes the external disk, and it is unable to accept commands.
A way of testing this, is to write to the entire disk..
Doing this will kill the entire drive, but will allow you to verify that you can write to the whole drive... (in addition to erasing everything on it.. )
make sure the disk is mounted in the finder.. and give it a uniqe name... so it will be easy to distinguish in the commands below.
THE FOLLOWING IS INTENDED AS A GUIDE. VERIFY YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING BEFORE YOU DESTROY VALUABLE DATA..
open the terminal program:
type the following:
df -h
you should see all the disks that the are connected to the system. a sample of the output is below:
it does not look so nice, as the font is not monospaced, but on the terminal window it lines up nicely:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 186G 124G 62G 67% /
devfs 97K 97K 0B 100% /dev
fdesc 1.0K 1.0K 0B 100% /dev
<volfs> 512K 512K 0B 100% /.vol
automount -nsl [182] 0B 0B 0B 100% /Network
automount -fstab [198] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/Servers
automount -static [198] 0B 0B 0B 100% /automount/static
/dev/disk1s1 466G 463G 2.4G 99% /Volumes/wd-usb-250
in my case the last disk is a WD mybook that I called "wd-usb-250"
now, in the finder, unmount the disk and make sure nothing is accessing it...
notice that the computer thinks that the disk is connected via the path:
/dev/disk1s1
VERIFY THAT THIS IS THE SAME FOR YOU.. IF NOT THEN USE THE APPROPRIATE DRIVE..
this next step will go and write zero's to the whole drive.. if you are not so adventures you could just read from the entire disk.. if there are major problems then the read will not work either.
SO: to write in the terminal do the following: THIS WILL KILL THE DISK YOU ARE TESTING... INSURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING...
NOTICE HOW IN THE COMMAND BELOW I HAVE /DEV/DISK1 NOT /DEV/DISK1S1.
TRUNCATE YOUR DEVICE ACCORDINGLY...
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk1 bs=16m
let it run till it either quits because of a i/o error or says it reached the end of the device.. if it reached the end of the device the device just had zero written to it..
it at the end will tell you how many 16Mb chunks of zero it wrote.. (this is assuming that your disk is a even multiple of 16Mb).
now to test that the device actually works, we can read the whole thing. by issuing the following command in the terminal.
dd if=/dev/disk1 | hexdump -C
you should get an output that looks like this (with the records being changed to be the size of your disk divided into 16 Mb chunks...:
00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................|
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
16777216 bytes transferred in 23.666544 secs (708900 bytes/sec)
Sorry for the long post, and hope this is not too technical but helps.
S.
Macbook, Macbook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   + virt machines, linux, xp, vista 2 gb RAM 200 Gb