Scribd
Upload
27 views3 pages

Summary

The document discusses how to check and repair bad sectors on hard drives and USB drives. It introduces DiskGenius as a free tool that can check disk health status and bad sectors. It then provides guides on how to check for bad sectors using DiskGenius or Windows file explorer, and how to repair bad sectors using the free DiskGenius software.

Uploaded by

desert2007sm
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
27 views3 pages

Summary

The document discusses how to check and repair bad sectors on hard drives and USB drives. It introduces DiskGenius as a free tool that can check disk health status and bad sectors. It then provides guides on how to check for bad sectors using DiskGenius or Windows file explorer, and how to repair bad sectors using the free DiskGenius software.

Uploaded by

desert2007sm
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

Summary

How do you check and pepair bad sectors for hard drives or USB drives? This
article is devoted to explaining bad sectors and introducing how to check and
repair bad sectors using a bad sector repair tool. Bad sector can occur on all
storage devices like hard drives, external HDDs, flash drives, SD cards, and SSDs.
A few bad sectors do not indicate that hard drive is surely to fail, as some bad
sectors can be repaired successfully. There is no need to be panic when your
hard drive contains bad sectors, you should always keep calm and follow this
guide to get them repaired.

DiskGenius - A free tool to check bad sectors and health status for HDDs, SD cards,
flash drives, SSDs, etc.
ô Free Download

Table of Contents:

 Overview on bad sectors


 Free bad sector repair tools
 Guide #1: How to check bad sectors for hard drives or USB drives? (3
Methods)
o Method 1: Check bad sectors with DiskGenius Free Edition
o Method 2: Scan the drive for bad sectors in File Explorer
o Method 3: Test bad sectors with CMD
 Guide #2: How to repair bad sectors using a free bad sector repair tool?
 Further reading 1: How to effectively test disk health status by checking
S.M.A.R.T. data?
 Further reading 2: What to do if my hard drive has bad sectors?
 Questions and answers
 Conclusion
Overview on bad sectors

What are hard drive bad sectors?

A bad sector is a sector on a hard disk that cannot be used due to permanent
damage (or an OS inability to successfully access it), such as physical damage to the
disk surface (or sometimes sectors being stuck in a magnetic or digital state that
cannot be reversed) or failed flash memory transistors. Something weird will happen
if the hard disk has bad sectors, for instance, operating system cannot boot
normally, hard disk can't be formatted, the drive becomes completely inaccessible,
error is reported when you attempt to open a file, etc. These phenomena show that
there must be bad sectors on the disk. In fact, it is very common that a disk has bad
sectors after being used for a long time. There are roughly two types of bad sectors:
physical (hard) bad sectors and logical (soft) bad sectors.

Physical/hard bad sectors are caused by physical damages to the storage itself,
such as scratches, magnetic field issues, or wear and tear over time. If a hard drive's
head touches the rotating plater, that area will be damaged. For example, your
computer gets bumped while its hard drive is writing data, hard disk is exposed to
extreme heat, or some mechanical part fails, all these are likely to cause hard bad
sectors. As to solid-state drive, bad sectors are the result of worn-out flash memory
cell or other defects. This type of bad sector cannot be repaired and often requires
replacing the affected drive, but it can be prevented in many cases.

Logical/soft bad sectors are sectors on hard drive that appear to not be working
properly. When operating system tries to read or write data stored on these sectors
and finds error correction code (ECC) which does not match content of the sector,
that indicates that something is wrong, and these sectors may be tagged as bad
sectors. Soft bad sectors are repairable by overwriting on disk with zeros, which can
be done by bad sector repair software such as DiskGenius.

You might also like