Bad sectors on the hard drive? Repair them without leaving home!

Each hard disk includes many sectors. Those that are unreadable or damaged are called bad. Due to many reasons, sectors can be damaged one by one. And the more bad sectors on the hard drive you have, the slower the hard drive will work. In the end, when the bad sectors on hard drive are more than the good ones, the device simply stops working. Often, in such situations, the user does not know what to do.

You can learn in this article how to fix bad sectors.

• When you try to open a disk, you see error messages like this: “Location is not available.” “Drive: D is not available.” “Data Error.”

• Hard drive is read as RAW.

• Applications take a very long time to open.

• The hard disk itself produces unusual sounds when working with it.

• You cannot complete the formatting of the disk and receive the error message “Windows could not complete formatting”.

• Restarting the computer is taking longer and longer.

You need to know whether your sectors have physical damage or logical. This greatly affects the ability of performing bad sector repair on your hard drive.

Physical damage to sectors is mechanical damage to the constituent parts of a hard disk (for example, damage to a hard disk head). Unfortunately, fixing bad sectors in this case is impossible, but it can be prevented by properly handling the hard disk.

Logical damage to sector mean that the disk does not work, but in fact is easy to fix. The sectors are marked as damaged when the OS tries to read them, and the codes do not match. Later, we will show how bad sector repair in such cases can be done.

1. 1. Any hard disk has a lifespan. Perhaps your hard disk has been in use long enough and therefore bad sectors have begun to appear.

1. 2. A dirty and dusty hard drive sooner or later will also have bad sectors.

1. 3. Sudden and improper shutdown of the computer can easily damage sectors. In the event of a sudden power outage, the head should quickly return to its original position and at the same time touch or even wipe the disk plate, which will inevitably lead to damage to the sectors.

1. 4. Careless usage of the hard disk. When hit or shaken, the hard disk can be damaged. This is most relevant to laptops.

1. 5. The hard drive itself may be of poor quality and from an unknown manufacturer.

Bad sector repair on Windows 7, 8 and 10

You can fix bad sectors yourself using built-in programs. For Windows 8 and 10, this method will look similar:

First, open This PC and right-click on the problem disk.

Then click on the last line of Properties and go to Tools. Here you will notice the Error Check section; click on this. After that, the disk check with the image in the subsequent research results will begin (the error and its status will be shown). In most cases, this will restore the disk.

In Windows 7, this process is slightly different:

Right-click the drive and select Properties. In the Tools section, click on the Check Now button and be sure to activate the Scan option and try to repair the bad sectors. Only after that, run a scan. Now you just need to wait for the results and hope that they will be satisfactory.

Pay attention: chkdsk will cut your file to 512kb, so better save files before you start to use this method.