skip the first 32k of stdin with dd?

You could use tail. Say:

./commandthatputsstuffonstdout | tail -c +1025 ...

to skip the first 1024 bytes of output produced by your command.

From man tail:

   -c, --bytes=K          output the last K bytes; alternatively,  use  -c  +K  to  output          bytes starting with the Kth of each file

I've just run into this too, and using the fullblock iflag prevents the short read and subsequent abort.

Example:

gzip -d < ./disk_image.dd.gz | \    dd bs=4M skip=32768 iflag=fullblock,skip_bytes of=./partial_image.dd

Bit late answer but this dd example worked for me.

Create example source file:

$ dd if=/tmp/somefile of=/tmp/test skip=50 bs=100 count=1

Skip 50 bytes and copy 10 bytes after it to test_skip file:

$ dd if=/tmp/test of=/tmp/test_skip skip=50 bs=1 count=1010+0 records in10+0 records out10 bytes (10 B) copied, 8.2091e-05 s, 122 kB/s

Or data from stdin:

cat /tmp/test| dd of=/tmp/stdin bs=1 skip=50 count=1

Verify output:

$ hexdump /tmp/test0000000 ebf3 e8fd df1b 0aa1 faa3 1fba 1817 12670000010 1402 f539 fb69 f263 f319 084b 0b26 11500000020 182a f98d 030c e0b0 e47c f13d ef3b 11460000030 0b7e 0f72 0e58 f2bd f403 ee95 e529 05670000040 f88e 1994 0e83 12e5 11e7 fd4b 032f f4f00000050 fc9d 010a 0ab6 06b6 1224 f5cb 01e4 e67a0000060 ebe0 f1a0                              0000064$ hexdump /tmp/test_skip0000000 0f72 0e58 f2bd f403 ee95

Source file offset 50 is byte: 0x0f