Error 36 and Terminal

Here's my situation:

I've got my crashed laptop drive in an enclosure connected via USB to my Imac. I'm trying to copy over the files to my iMac drive. I keep getting this error -36. I've narrowed that down to either filesystem or IO error. It was suggested to use Terminal.app to move the files because there is a flaw in Finder.

I'm a total noob when it comes to Terminal and Unix. I'd appreciate any help with the context.

I want to move my itunes and photos which are on the desktop of the drive.
Is there a way to copy the entire folder to a drive and what are the lines of code for that in Terminal?

 

I tried that and I got back this:


usage: cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-apvX] source_file target_file
cp [-R [-H | -L | -P]] [-fi | -n] [-apvX] source_file ... target_directory

Like I said, I'm a big time noob with this stuff. Right now Terminal is sitting in the root of my mac (I think).

The path I'm trying to copy is from the external drive /OS/Users/ColtAV45/Desktop

I'd like to just copy that straight over.

 

BigDave,

The code works but I still get the Error -36 pop up when it tries to copy certain files over. What can I do? Do you know how to solve that?