Before how to hard disk bad sector repair, let’s understand what bad sectors are in a hard drive. The hard disk bad sector repair is based on how is the hard drive damaged. Your hard drive stores data on spinning discs called platters coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. Each platter is divided into circular tracks, which are further divided into individual sectors.

A sector is the smallest unit of physical storage space on the hard drive the older hard drives store 512 bytes in each sector, while newer drives may use the Advanced Format (AF) to store 4 kilobytes of data.

As the platters spin, a set of actuator heads float over them. The actuator heads read and write the magnetic charges on the sectors, then send that information to your computer.

The Hard Disk is in Bad Sector due to wear and tear. Other common causes include manufacturer defects, direct physical damage, and some software errors. It is divided into two sectors.

Hard Disk Bad Sector Repair

Physical Hard Disk Bad Sector Repair

These Bad sectors are physically damaged storage clusters on the Hard Drive and turn storage clusters in the form of a fixed magnetic state. All types of reading and write operations execution get inhibited. Neither OS nor disk controller can access them. You can prevent these bad sectors but cannot repair them.

Logical Hard Disk Bad Sector Repair

These Bad sectors are storage cluster that does not appear to function correctly. For both OS and Disk Controller software, these sectors are inaccessible. These sectors occur when the sector found Error Correction Code does not go in sync with the Sector content. You can repair these bad sectors by overwriting zeros on everything on the disk.

Hard Disk Bad Sector Causes

With continuous usage, hard drives tend to get rough & lose their magnetic nature.

• Over-ageing: After a particular period, over-aging is bad for every electronic device. The reason after a stipulated time frame, these devices continue to fail and eventually degrade.
• Over-heating: Another standard issue. Whether you are using the new or old Hard Drive, it will fail or get damaged if there is overheating.
• File System Error: File System Errors are one of the major bad sector causes. The impact of this cause not only makes it inaccessible but it makes it permanently damaged and non-recoverable.

When you meet one of the following symptoms, your hard drive or external storage devices may contain bad sectors:

• Strange friction sound when booting or running a hard drive.
• System pops up an error message, like Sector not found or General error in reading drive C, etc.
• The disk won’t format, getting an error.
• Scandisk (a diagnostic utility) automatically runs when the system is booted.
• Some operations are stuck or become random to a certain process.

Formatting a hard drive won’t “fix” Hard Disk Bad Sectors, but it should mark them as bad (unusable), and therefore no data would be written to those bad sectors.

Hard Disk Bad Sector Repair Tool

To repair bad sectors from the hard disk permanently, you can use the Windows CHKDSK command.

Once you have repaired the disk using the Command Prompt, you can format it entirely. In this way, you can regain the hard disk sector that was previously unavailable or corrupt.

You can follow these steps to fix bad sectors on the hard drive by formatting them.

• Go to Windows Explorer and select the drive you wish to wipe. Right-click and go to the “Format” option.
• It would open a dedicated pop-up window where you can select the file system (like FAT or NTFS) or change the partition table style. Click on the “Format” button to wipe the drive.

You can also format the disk from the Disk Management utility that you can access from Control Panel > Computer Management.

• Select the partition, right-click, and click on the “Format” button. Now, you can follow the steps to format the hard drive.

Over time, however, sectors can become unreliable. A sector becomes a “Hard Disk Bad Sector” when the computer identifies it as permanently damaged. The sector is unusable, and any data within is lost. If a hard drive has a huge number of bad sectors, some files may become corrupt.