I have a hard drive with a bad PCB board. It stays on when not under heavy load and it will restart if I copy too much data off it. So far I have had good luck doing folders under 500 MB in size if I copy one folder to my good hard drive, wait five minutes, copy another, etc.
If I mount the bad drive and try to copy a folder of several GBs in size it will start and then stop as the hard drive restarts. When I try to mount the drive again Linux says it can't read the superblock. I have several folders with over 30 GB of data in many different folders.
What I am looking for is a way of copying a folder in Linux such that the commands grab the whole folder in chunks with a timed break in-between.