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?