External hard drive, error -36, corrupt files and slow transfer speeds

This is a long post but stay with me.
I've got an external 250GB Lacie drive connected to my 24" Intel iMac via Firewire 800. I have approximately 80GB worth of files (including my iPhoto library) on the Lacie that I'm trying to move over to my iMac but have run into some frustrating problems.
Overall, transfer speeds are erratic – fine at times and SUPER SLOW (5 minutes to transfer a 3MB file) at other times. At first I was transferring entire folders, but after always getting errors (error -36 to be exact), I was having to transfer individual files. This works fine as long as the files aren't too big (which makes the transfer speeds SUPER SLOW) and not corrupt (which gets me an error -36). Is my Lacie crashing on me? Is there any hope?
Here's what I've done to try and salvage my sanity with no resolve to my problems (not exactly in this order):
1) Ran Disk Utility to repair Lacie. Everything came back OK
2) Ran Disk Warrior on Lacie. Found a handful of bad items that Disk Warrior was able to repair. Had Disk Warrior replace the old directory of the Lacie with the new directory.
3) Ran Drive Genius: Raired and Rebuilt the directory, did an Integrity Check (came back OK), attempted to Defrag but could not because of errors to the drive, did a Scan for bad blocks (which after running for 3 days! it was only 20% complete and had found over 150 bad blocks, at which point I quit to try something else)
4) Checked that my Firewire cable was properly connected and replaced the older one I was using with a brand new one.
5) Disconnected all peripherals except for keyboard, mouse and Lacie.
6) And at times, even viewing a file on the Lacie has caused my Finder to crash, requiring a restart of my iMac.
I'm sure I've left something off I've tried but you get the idea.
I've read that maybe I can transfer my files using Terminal. Yes/No? Does this bypass any corruption the files may have?
What about creating a second partition on the Lacie and moving files over to the second partition? Does this solve anything? I don't know anything about partitioning so maybe I'm talking crazy.
I've also read that iPhoto tends to corrupt files which makes me hate iPhoto, and myself for not backing up.
And I've read a lot about error -36's and none of it sounds good so I'm just hoping that someone might have other suggestions for me to try and save my files (especially my iPhoto files which include baby pictures that if I lose, my wife will kill me).
So if anyone has any ideas, let me know. Please. I'll try anything.

Hi Aaron Thompson-
I am fairly certain you have a bad power supply brick to the LaCie drive. This is a hard problem to troubleshoot as generally when the bricks go bad they do so slowly and the drive appears to power up and stuff but it just doesn't work.
If the drive is under warranty LaCie will replace the brick at no charge. Otherwise they sell them for around $20US on their website.
Luck-
-DP

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