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I have a hard drive reporting weak sectors but I don't believe it is damaged, so I want to "Reinitialize disk surface" with Hard Disk Sentinel as proposed in thread.

It is an acer laptop with a bunch of hidden partitions. I would destroy them all and I don't want that to happen.

I have created a Windows to Go hard drive which I can use to treat the internal drive without plugging it out. Which again is important because of warranty.

I created a disk image with clonezilla, skipping unreadable sectors. But I can't really tell if that only image when restored will boot, especially because I can't tell in which partition the weak sectors are. Googling "acer clone hdd -ssd recovery clonezilla hidden" lists entries of unbootable drives. I fear it won't boot later when I restore it. I need a more surefire way or at least somebody who can nod it off.

How can I clone existing partitions one by one so that if everything is good, I can put them back on the disk exactly as it was? Is it enough to know how big each partitions was? Do the acer specific buttons still work then?

News: MHDD shows "ERR" with UNC 4840 and is 74.8% through. Is there any chance to save the drive? 4840 sectors(?) are 1.2 MB(?) so by the end of the scan a few MB are corrupt, can we just chop them away, ignore them use the drive? Am I miscalculating?

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  • Boot to software that supports creating an image, save it to an external hdd, the restore the image
    – Ramhound
    Jul 11, 2014 at 20:40
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    You have to have some degree of faith that it will work when you have no other system to test it on. You could try restoring the cloned image in a virtual machine. Worst case you'll need to ask the manufacturer for their recovery disks to restore the system if it fails. Personally the first thing I always do is wipe the mostly useless recovery partitions that they make and create my own backup with acronis or clonezilla.
    – Enigma
    Jul 11, 2014 at 20:54
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    You can clone the whole disk and all of its partitions to the same backup image. No need to do them one by one. Acer specific buttons are interperated by software usually by means of a driver. Sometimes windows has a generic driver that covers the special functions.
    – Enigma
    Jul 11, 2014 at 20:56

2 Answers 2

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Use CloneZilla LiveCD and a large USB hard disk.

CloneZilla is capable of copying using various methods for different filesystems. If you are unsure then you can use CloneZilla to "dd" to make a bit-by-bit copy of your entire hard disk (including boot sectors).

Note: "dd" is not part of CloneZilla but it uses it as a "last attempt" method of backing up a disk if it encounters partitions it cannot understand.

CloneZilla can clone from disk to disk but it is more widely used to store multiple compressed images on a large hard disk. It pipes the data through compressors such as gzip to create files on a hard disk so you can create multiple backups.

I would use this to at least make an initial "dd" of your failing disk so you're sure you have your precious data.

You don't even need to use CloneZilla... You could use "dd" on a Linux LiveCD and pipe the output to gzip to a file (.gz) on your USB backup disk...

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Use either mhdd or buy a copy of Spinrite. You will not have to clone anything it will scan and repair the surface as is. Spinrite is the better product, but it cost money.

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