Any "drag and drop" tricks for transferring TM backups onto new drive?

I've read many of the previous threads like mine, but my situation seems to be unique.

I have a damaged Time machine disk that is corrupted and can't be repaired by any disk utility programs. And I want to temporarily transfer the TM backups to another hard drive while I reformat the TM disk. I have snow leopard, but the finder won't let me drag and drop my time machine backups (Backups.backupdb) onto a new drive. I get the same "The backup can’t be copied because the backup volume doesn’t have ownership enabled" error. However, when I get info on the drive I want to transfer the backups to and uncheck "ignore ownership on this volume", I still get an error when dragging and dropping the time machine backups. The new error reads "This operation can't be completed because it isn't supported."

Are there any other things I can try to get drag and drop to work? I would have used the methods described above (clone the TM drive using disk utility or CCC), but I can't do that as my time machine disk contains a lot of other items besides the TM backups, and the disk I'm trying to drag the TM backups too is actually smaller than the TM disk. Since my TM disk is corrupted, I can't delete the extra files on the disk to make a clone that would fit on my smaller new disk. So I'm unable to clone my TM disk because it's too big. Is there any other way to make the drag and drop work in snow leopard? Everyone says it should, but I've been unable to get it to work.