Bad disk copying

[David C. Albrecht]

Help!  This is driving me crazy.  I'm trying to back up disk 8 of 8 in
my Unix utilities development set.  Unfortunately it has a bad sector.
Fortunately its a relatively empty disk and its not on anything important.
Unfortunately in the fashion of most incompletely thought out utilities
the floppy disk copy program sucks as it exits on a bad sector instead of
getting what it can informing you of the error and doing the copy.

Now the disks, of course, are in cpio format so disk fixing is out of the
question I suspect (and even I'm not crazy enough to let any software on the
machine try to write on the disk when I can't back it up).  As a last resort
I can always restore all the files to a relative directory location and
re-cpio them but I'd rather not.  I've tried various incantations to 'dd'
but obviously I didn't swing the rubber chicken around my head enough times
or my eye-of-newt wasn't properly seasoned because I'd get the ol' ack! phoey!
if I tried to feed it to cpio as the 8th disk.

If anyone can give me the proper incantations for communicating with the
spirits of dead floppy disks so as to make copies of them I would be
most obliged.

David Albrecht