Q: I can't move my Time Machine backups

I have over a year's worth of Time Machine backups on a 500 GB WD My Passport drive. A little while ago I ran WD Drive Utilites tests on the drive and it failed the complete drive test so I figured it might be time to get a new drive to move my backups to. Now I have a brand new 1TB WD My Passport Ultra formatted to Mac OSX Extended (Journaled) and ready to go. Then I dragged the Backups folder from the old drive to the new drive. It spent about two hours preparing to copy and when it finally started copying it popped up with a message saying "Finder could not complete the operation because (some file) could not be read or written - error code 36".

I tried dot_clean. It said "Bad Pathname, Permission Denied". I even tried sudo dot_clean. That seems to run suceesfully, but it didn't solve the problem. I tried using the Restore tab in disk utility but that failed and said there was and input/output error. I ran First Aid on the old backup drive and everything seemed to be fine. I ran it again on Terminal and even tried hsck and all of them said the disk was fine.

At this point I should mention the reason I even bothered with any of this in the first plae. About a month ago, I ran Disk Utility's First Aid on my MBP's internal drive. It told me I needed to boot into Recovery Mode and repair the drive. When I tried that, it said Disk Utility was unable to repair the drive and I should back up all my stuff and reformat. The thing is though, I haven't had any problems with my computer. It works fine and there has been absolutley no reason to suggest that something is wrong with the drive. But still, I figured just in case something happened, I should get a new backup drive because the old one seemed to be failing.

But I can't move them. I know I could start over with Time Machine, and I will if it turns out there is absolutely no way to get my backups off the old disk, but right now I just want to know why I can't move them and if the problem will recur. Nothing I've found on the Internet seems to apply to my situation.

Would a teminal command like ditto or cp work in my situation? Is there something wrong with my backups? Are the problems with my internal drive messing up the transfer somehow? Please help!