Unable to backup from one external USB drive to another

Hi all, this one's been doing my head in for a few days and now I'm waving the white flag of surrender and deciding to ask on here.
I'm trying to backup some of my video files off one of my external HDDs onto another external HDD (or DVD - more on that in a minute) but I don't appear to be able to do so. The files I'm attempting to back up are either my own DVD rips or iTunes Movie purchases, since we don't yet have Movies in the Cloud in the UK. At various points during the copy procedure I get the following messages:
The Finder can't complete the operation because some data in <<various names>>.m4v can't be read or written. (Error code -36)
then, after clicking OK, I get:
The operation can't be completed because one or more required items can't be found (Error code -43)
If I use Finder to navigate to the offending named file, there it is in its original place on external disk 1 all nice and happy. In iTunes the file is in the playlist and is perfectly playable. I have turned off "enable disks to sleep where possible" in Preferences to see if one or the other may be going to sleep during the operation. If I use Disk Utility to verify the two HDDs in question both come up as OK. User Permissions are of course off for the external drives and I have tried reformatting the 2nd drive jsut in case. Obviously I can't reformat drive 1 since it contains the data I'm trying to back up and since I can't back it up......you get the idea.
If I try to use a DVD to backup the media files I'm getting the same errors, along with (in the case of an external DVD drive) something about comunnication between the computer and the drive has failed. Now I'm fairly sure I should be able to backup my data for archiving purposes so does anyone have any idea what could be casuing this problem?
I'm currently trying again, using yet another external drive and to copy just over 18.5GB it's giving me an estimated completion time of 15 hours and has seemingly frozen on 50.3MB copied! Now I know USB 2.0 is slow by today's standards but still I feel this is a little excessive. It's now down to 3 hours estimated but keeps pausing and climbing to 15+ then back down again. I'm guessing it's either a read error from disk 1 or a write error to disk 2 but since Verify Disk is showing both are OK I'm not sure how to tell which. And now I just got the error messages quoted at the top of the page again.
OK, ideas anyone.....

You can copy the entire to a file. Use the dmg extension. Double click on file to mount.
Perhaps you should run disk utility on the drive. Maybe the filesystem is mess up.
Do a bit-by-bit copy
You can use the following command to display all partitions:
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
# This is a little deep.
#It is best to do the pdisk command before you eject the external hard drive. Now, eject the external hard drive. Do another pdisk command to see what drive name has disappeared. The disappearing name is the name of your external hard drive.
sudo pdisk -l
#for details...
man pdisk
# Do a bit-by-bit copy.
#eject the partition in the normal GUI
Macintosh-HD -> Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
dd if=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096 | gzip | dd of=~/disk0-s10 bs=4096
#this can take awhile. Open another window and do ls -l ~/disk0-s10
# Here is how to restore the partition.
dd if=~/disk0-s10 bs=4096 | gunzip | dd of=/dev/disk0s10 bs=4096
Don't zero out your unused records, since you are having problems with your disk.
Here is another way to run the command. When you run the command in the background you can question how for the process has gotten. Adjust or eliminate count as needed.
mac $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1024 count=1kx1k of=/Volumes/MacOSFirewire/zero&
[1] 510
mac $ man kill
mac $ kill -s siginfo 510
953197+0 records in
953196+0 records out
976072704 bytes transferred in 82.524495 secs (11827673 bytes/sec)
mac $ 1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes transferred in 89.700333 secs (11970322 bytes/sec)
Here are two utilities for making a complete backup of your internal hard drive. I've recommend using one of these so that you can create a bootable system on your external hard drive. ( PPC require a firewire connected drive. ) Once created, you can run your system from the external drive. Hold down the option key on your keyboard then power on your machine. This will bring you in startup manager click on the drive image you wish to boot then click on the arrow key to the right.
"Clone, synchronize, backup. Schedule and forget it."
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
"SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless."
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

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