What is the Bad Sector in Hard Drive & How to Fix It?

A disk is made up of number of sectors which enable user to read and write on hard disk drive. It is the minimum storage unit of disk. All the files must store at least single sector. Basically bad sectors are those sectors which are damaged and are unusable part in hard disk. Bad sectors make operating system incapable to read or access information. If any hard drive has bad sectors then it will not allow user to access information which is stored in it.

Bad sectors can be categorized in two types: soft & hard. Soft bad sectors are those sectors that are not working properly while sectors that are physically damaged come under hard bad sectors. Bad sectors in a hard drive are the main cause of hard drive failure but these bad sectors are easily fixed by free utilities such as error checking disk tool, test disk tool, etc.  These utilities can easily find and mark them as unusable so that operating system skip those sectors in future and allow user to access their hard drive data.

When a disk utility detects bad sector in a hard drive then it remapped that sector as free and the file that was unreadable because of bad sector gets lost. To avoid data lose issue; you should always keep backup of your important data while using bad sector checking tools.

How to Fix Bad Sector in Hard Drive with Error Check Disk Utility

Before Running Check Disk Utility close all the running programs because if any program which is running has bad sectors then check disk utility can’t scan or fix bad sector of that program.

Step 1:- Click on Start and then click on Computer.

Step 2:- Do right click on the drive you want to check for bad sector and then click on properties

Step 3:- Properties Window will appear, Go-to Tools Tab and click on Check now button

Step 4:- After click on check now button, a new window will be appear that will provide two options: “Automatically Fix File System Errors” and “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sector”. Just check the box next to “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sector” option and then click on start.

 Step 5:- After clicking on start it will start scanning your drive and if find any bad sector then automatically fix them.

After completing the Disk checking program you will receive successful scanned message on your computer screen.

To view bad sector report you can click see details to read the bad sector report.

 

Alternate Method 

Use Command prompt to check your hard drive partitions

Step1 : Press Window + R and Type cmd and then enter

Step2 : Command Prompt Windows will appear type below command

chkdsk E(drive name): /F (type f to fix error) and then enter

It will scan the whole partition for errors and fix them to make your drive healthy

Have Lost Your Data Due to Bad Sectors of Drive?

If you have already lost your data because of bad sectors issue then don’t be so tensed. Your data is not vanished from hard drive and is still available for recovery. To get your lost data back, download Stellar Phoenix Windows data recovery – free edition. You can save up-to 1 GB recovered data without any cost.

Have Formatted Your Hard Drive - What to Do to Recover Data?

Hard drives can be easily formatted to avoid various problems such as lack of security, storage capacity issue, drive not accessible, drive affected by malware and many more reasons. Most of the times user formats their hard drive to make hard drive clean and ready for new data storage. I know, most of the people take backup of their data before formatting the drive but some people just forget to backup as my friend did. He had formatted his drive without backup of all collage photographs. Thanks to Stellar Data recovery, we had managed to recover our all photographs using its Partition recovery software.

For instance let’s assume that you have formatted your hard drive with the assumption that you have backup of your formatted data. But after a moment you realize that the formatted hard drive had lots of your important files and now they are not present in backup. What you will do now? Possibly you will look into the recycle bin or try to restore your files from previous version. But what if you don’t find your files in recycle bin or in previous version? What cause of action you will take to get your files back?

Let’s know what you can do to restore your files from Formatted Hard Drive

First don’t panic and remove that hard drive from the computer, so that lost data cannot be overwritten by other files.

Second, install another hard drive into your computer or if you already have two hard drives in the system then install free data recovery software on the other one.

Connect formatted hard drive as the external one and run free data recovery software. But before downloading free data recovery software make sure that the data recovery tool is reliable and fully efficient to recover lost data from formatted hard drive. As we have already discussed above about the free data recovery software of stellar for successful recovery from formatted hard drive. So you can download it to recover your precious data from its professional website. After downloading stellar data recovery software you will find its interface very easy and user friendly.

It will give you option to select hard drive for recovery, just select your formatted hard drive and click on recovery button from right side penal.

This tool’s free version will allows you to scan the whole formatted hard drive and also give preview of your all lost files. After taking preview of deleted files you can click on recovery button to go forward for save process. With its free version you can save up to 1 GB data for free. If you want to recover data above than 1 GB limit then you can download its full version.

How To Do Formatted Hard Drive Recovery?

It is always difficult to recover data from formatted hard drive and it becomes more pathetic when we reformat that drive.  After formatting hard drive we just left to wonder how to recover data from formatted hard drive. But now days with the advance technology it is not so difficult to recover deleted or lost data from hard drives.

Sometimes user comes into circumstances where they need to format their hard drive to run system smoothly. For instance if your system gets affected by virus and because of that unwanted bugs your computer runs too slow or take long time to complete single command. To deal with this situation wiping the hard drive is the best solution but before wipe the drive always make sure that you have taken the back up. Sometimes it happens, when user are in hurry they forgets to back up their important data and format their hard drive without giving a single thought. And when they realize that they have lost their data forever, it’s too late and they feel helpless and get panic.

When we accidently format our hard drive we think that we have lost our data forever and now there are no chances for data recovery. But this presumption is wrong because deleting data from hard drive doesn’t mean that data is removed from the disk memory. Formatting hard drive is only the process through which we make some space to restore other files. If after deleting files we do not use that formatted hard drive then that deleted files are still present in the disk memory and are still available for recovery.

If the data that you have lost due to formatting is important for you and you don’t want to take risk for that data then using a professional data recovery tool is the safest option for recovery.  There are lots of free data recovery tools available which can easily recover lost data from formatted hard drive. Download any free tool like Stellar Phoenix free data recovery software and get your lost data back.

Once you have downloaded data recovery software, you will see how easy it is to recover lost data from formatted hard drive. Software will give you option to select the drive for recovery; you just need to select that drive and click on recovery button. After this the software will do the rest of the work, it will scan the drive and show you preview of all your lost data. After getting all your files you can save them at your desire location.

Conclusion: The Data recovery tools are lifesavers when something goes wrong with our hard drives. If you have lost your data from hard drive then the data recovery tool helps you to track that lost data.