Clonezilla-ing fails on a bad(?) disk

I'm trying to do a physical to virtual conversion on an old laptop, by imaging the hd, and then copying it to a virtual machine. The laptop normally boots and runs fine, however Clonezilla fails with the default options, saying it found bad sectors, scandisk couldn't find anything, so I copied the system with the -rescue option, but then it won't boot in the VM (in safe mode it stopped at mup.sys, but i think this question already has too many branches) Am I doing it wrong? How can i check for bad sectors if windows can't find them?