A new hard drive, a question about file transfer.

A hard drive monitoring utility I have (Hard Disk Sentinel Pro) has warned me that my data drive is on its last legs. As usual these days I was able to get a larger one at a cheaper price than what I bought the old one at.

I installed and formatted it with little problem. However, every clone or transfer app I've tried has choked. I think the issue might be related to the failing sectors. I've tried fixing the old drive with chkdsk, but it tells me the drive's in use. I try to boot to the command prompt, and I get a message asking me for the admin password, but the one I enter it says it's wrong. Even after I change it...

Anyway, (sorry for taking the long way to get to my question), since it's not my boot drive, is there any reason why I can't just drag and copy the files to the new drive? I guess I should do only a couple of hundred gigs at a time (going from 2TB to 4TB) to keep things from choking. After I'm satisfied the transfer is successful, I'll remove the old hard drive and give its drive letter to the new one.

Any thoughts?