How to Recover Data from Hard Drive with Bad Sectors

"My Windows 10 computer got stuck in a boot repair loop. After some investigation, I found bad sectors, especially issues with system 32 to be the problem. I'd love to get the data off my old drive. How can I recover data from my hard drive with bad sectors?"

What Does a Bad Sector Mean in Windows 10/8/7

Bad sectors often occur when the disk surface gets physical damage, or the transistors failed. Usually, bad sectors on the hard drive or external storage devices are either inaccessible or unwriteable. With more bad sectors accumulate on the hard drive, the more data you'll lose on it. And the hard drive may even not be able to work or function normally again.

Considering this feature of the bad sector, we highly recommend you to get and restore data from the hard drive to a new storage device before the growing bad sectors take over your drive.

Tip 1. Clone and Copy Hard Drive Data to New Drive Skipping Bad Sectors

When your hard drive is failing to function properly with bad sectors, the most straightforward way to resolve this issue is not to repair the existing bad sectors but to clone hard drive data skipping bad sectors to a new secure drive. Here we'd like to recommend you try a 100% working disk cloning software - Qiling Disk Copy that fully supports all Windows system disk cloning or hard drive upgrading with simple clicks.

Your Safe & Effective Qiling Disk Copy

Clone a hard disk even there are bad sectors on it.
Make a full copy of contents on a disk and move your data, system, or apps to another hard drive.
It supports one-click OS migration to avoid reinstalling the operating system.

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You can apply it to clone the hard drive data without bad sectors to a new disk. To guarantee a higher success rate, we'd like to recommend you create a bootable disk in advance. You can follow the tutorial steps below to start the process now:

Step 1: Download, install and run Qiling Disk Copy on your PC.

Step 2. Choose "Disk/Partition clone" in the tool page to start.

Step 3. Select the hard drive that you want to copy or clone. Click Next to continue.

Step 4. Select the destination disk where you want to clone/copy the old disk and click Next to continue.

Note: The destination disk should be at least the same big or even larger than the source disk if you want to copy or clone the source hard disk.

Step 5: Check and edit the disk layout.

If your destination disk is an SSD drive, do remember to tick "Optimize for SSD" option if the target is SSD.

Step 6: Click "Proceed" to start the hard drive cloning process.

A warning message tells you that the data on the destination disk will be overwritten. Click "OK" to continue if you do not have important data on the destination disk.

If the hard drive is not working properly and can't even boot, please refer to clone failing hard drive to new HDD/SSD for a guide.

Tip 2. Recover Data from a Hard Drive with Bad Sectors

The other way that can help you get data off the hard drive with a bad sector is to restore existing and lost data from it to a secure disk or external storage device.

Professional hard drive data recovery software - Deep Data Recovery can find all existing and lost data from your hard drive with bad sectors. Besides, this data recovery software can:

Recover lost or deleted files, documents, photos, audio, music, emails easily.
Recover files from SD card, emptied recycle bin, memory card, and flash drive.
Support data recovery for sudden deletion, formatting, hard drive corruption, and virus attack.

If the hard drive with bad sectors is still working on your PC, follow the steps below to restore and get data off the hard drive with bad sectors:

Step 1. Scan the hard drive partition

Open Deep Data Recovery, select the hard drive partition where you lost data and click "Scan".

Step 2. Preview found hard drive data

The Filter and Search features can help you access lost files via file types, file names or extensions. Double-click to preview these lost files.

Step 3. Recover lost hard drive data.

Select all the lost hard drive files and click the "Recover" button to save them to another secure location.

If your hard drive is completely dead, please refer to recover data from a dead external hard drive as a guide. The operation steps are the same as your hard drive.

Conclusion

Bad sectors on your hard drive can lead to complete inaccessibility of the drives and data loss. If your hard disk has some bad sectors, try the solutions in this post. Qiling Disk Copy makes it easy to solve hard disk errors.

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