Bad Sector Repair: How to Fix Bad Sectors on HDD in Windows 10/8/7

When a hard disk has bad sectors, it's essential to act quickly to prevent data loss. The first step is to run a disk check using the built-in tool in your operating system, such as Check Disk (chkdsk) in Windows or fsck in macOS. If the disk check identifies bad sectors, you can try to repair them using the tool.

PAGE CONTENT:

Hard Disk Bad Sector Overview
How to Check Bad Sectors in Hard Disk Windows 10
How to Repair Bad Sectors on Hard Drive in Windows 10

First Back Up and Clone Hard Drive with Bad Sectors by Using a Disk Cloning Tool
Repair Soft/Logical Bad Sectors in Windows
Hard/Physical Bad Sector Repair

Occasionally, when one or more bad sectors come upon a hard disk, the disk will go bad. When this happens, the data in those bad sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable. In order to help you perform bad sectors repair on hard drive and rescue your data as soon as possible, we suggest you follow through with the tips below before you take action to repair bad sectors.

HDD Bad Sector Overview

To effectively address the issue of bad sectors on your drive, it's essential to first understand what they are and how they affect your system. Bad sectors are areas on a hard drive where the data cannot be read or written, often due to physical damage or wear and tear.

What Is Bad Sector

A bad sector, also known as a bad block, is a permanently damaged storage unit on a hard disk. Once a sector is damaged, all information stored in that section is lost. Operating systems, such as Windows 10/8/7, typically skip over bad sectors once they're identified and marked, preventing further data loss.

Two types of Bad Sectors

There are two types of bad sectors: Hard bad sectors (physical bad sectors) and Soft bad sectors (logical bad sectors).

Hard bad sectors are primarily caused by physical damage, such as manufacturing errors or physical trauma, whereas soft bad sectors are typically the result of software issues, like file system errors or improper hard drive use.

Due to the various causes of bad sectors, the methods for repairing them also differ. Fortunately, there are effective solutions to fix bad sectors on your hard drive in Windows 10/8/7, which can be found by continuing to read.

How to Check Bad Sectors in Hard Disk on Windows 10/8/7

Bad sectors can be categorized into physical and logical bad sectors. A simple way to distinguish between them is to check if you can identify bad sectors on your drive. If you can, it's likely a logical bad sector, whereas if you can't, it's probably a physical bad sector.

If you can run a disk checking and get the basic information about bad sectors, it's likely that your drive has soft bad sectors. If not, the situation will likely worsen and result in hard bad sectors.

To clearly know the amount of bad sectors on a hard drive, a free disk management tool like Qiling Partition Master Free is recommended, which can check for bad sectors on a hard disk with one click on Windows 10/8/7.

The software offers advanced hard drive partitioning features, including resizing and moving partitions, creating, merging, formatting, and wiping partitions. It also allows for converting FAT32 to NTFS without data loss, and switching between MBR and GPT disk formats.

Step 1. Download Qiling Disk Master and install it. Click on the disk you want to check in the "Disk Management" page, then select "Surface test" from the options.

Step 2. Click "Proceed" button, then operation will be immediately performed. Bad sectors will be marked as red.

When there are too many bad sectors, the scanning process may get stuck. It's best to wait patiently for the process to complete, as it will then provide an accurate count of the bad sectors present.

Tips

1. If there are only a few bad sectors, you may use a disk repair tool to fix them efficiently.

2. If the bad sectors on your hard drive have accumulated to a certain extent, it's usually best to replace the drive with a healthy one and clone the hard drive to the new one.

3. If you're experiencing serious errors with abnormal noise on the drive, cloning the disk and replacing it might still be worth a shot. However, if the error worsens, take immediate action to avoid further damage.

How to Fix Bad Bad Sectors on HDD in Windows 10

When the operating system detects bad sectors, it marks them as unusable, resulting in unavoidable data loss and reduced disk capacity. To fix and remove bad sectors from the hard disk, follow these tutorials for in-depth guidance.

First Thing to Do: Back Up and Clone HDD to a Good Hard Drive (Skip Bad Sectors)

If a disk contains many soft bad sectors, is always stuck or slow to load data on the computer, or the drive is failing due to physical bad sectors, it's impossible to repair bad sectors. The wise choice is to back up and save your data first. To copy a hard drive with bad sectors, you can use a third-party software such as EaseUS Todo Backup, Acronis True Image, or Disk Drill, which can clone or backup the hard drive despite the bad sectors. These tools can help you create a full backup or clone of the hard drive, including all data and settings, even if the drive is failing or has many bad sectors.

Qiling Disk Copy can skip bad sectors and clone a disk to create a full copy of your hard drive.

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Some key features of Qiling disk cloning software:

To transfer your OS to a new hard drive without reinstalling Windows and applications, you can use a tool like Acronis True Image or EaseUS Todo PCTrans. These tools allow you to clone your current hard drive to the new one, preserving your OS, applications, and data.
Clone a larger HDD to a smaller SSD
Clone hard drive to USB flash drive easily

Download and apply this disk copy software to easily upgrade and clone a hard drive with bad sectors to a healthy one, making the process effortless and efficient.

If your computer won't boot into your operating system, create a bootable USB in advance. Connect the new hard drive to the computer as a storage device and follow the steps to copy your data.

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

Choose "Disk/Partition clone" to start.

Step 2. Select the smaller hard drive as the source disk. Click "Next" to continue.

If you need to copy as the source option will copy/clone the same layout of partitions on your source disk to the destination disk, please select the "Sector by sector clone" option.

Step 3: Choose the bigger hard drive to save the data and then click "Next".

Step 4: Edit the disk layout and then click "Proceed" to continue.

If your destination disk is an SSD drive, make sure to select the "Optimize for SSD" option if the target is SSD.

A warning message informs you that the data on the destination disk will be overwritten. If you don't have important data on the destination disk, you can click "OK" to proceed.

After the cloning process is complete, shut down your computer, replace the old hard drive with the newly upgraded one, and set the computer to boot from the new hard drive instead of the old one in the BIOS settings.

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Repair Soft/Logical Bad Sectors in Windows

If your hard drive has bad sectors, you can still access it and use tools to repair and remove the bad sectors permanently.

1. Run CHKDSK Command and Format Hard Drive

If your hard drive has only a few bad sectors, you can use the CHKDSK command to scan and repair them. After running CHKDSK, you can then format the drive to ensure the bad sectors are properly addressed.

Step 1. Run the CHKDSK command to fix soft bad sectors.

1. Press the Windows key and type cmd.

2. Right-click "Command Prompt" and choose "Run as administrator".

3. To run a full check on your hard drive, type the command `chkdsk E: /f /r /x` in the Command Prompt and press Enter. Replace "E" with the actual drive letter of your hard drive. This command will run a thorough check on the drive, fixing any errors it finds and recovering any readable data it can. The `/f` option forces the check to run, the `/r` option tells the check to attempt to recover any readable data from the drive, and the `/x` option tells the check to not prompt you to press a key before it starts.

Step 2. Format hard drive to usable again

1. Right-click on your hard drive in Windows File Explorer and select Properties.

2. Select "Format" from the drop-down menu, set the file system to NTFS, check the box next to "Quick Format", and click "Start".

After this, you can save your data back to your hard drive and use it again, making it easily accessible for future reference.

2. Use a free disk check and repair tool to fix bad sectors

Qiling partition management software offers the simplest method to check and fix hard drive errors, allowing users to apply its Check File System option to check and repair hard disk partition errors in Windows 10.

To check the file system on a Windows 10, 8, or other Windows OS, download and run Qiling partition management software, locate the hard disk, and then run the check file system.

Hard/Physical Bad Sectors Repair

If your hard drive contains bad sectors, normal repair solutions may not work. The only way to fix this issue is to perform a low-level format on the drive, which resets the hard drive's blocks, clusters, and sectors.

A low-Modern hard drives are low-level formatted at the factory for the life of the drive, and a PC cannot perform an LLF on a modern IDE/ATA or SCSI hard disk, which would destroy the hard disk. This means that a bad sector cannot be repaired.

To resolve this issue, you have two choices:

1. Send your hard drive to the manufacturer or a local repair center to have it customized for a low-level format, which can help restore its original factory settings and potentially resolve issues.

2. Cloning the disk with bad sectors to a good hard drive helps avoid worsening the hard disk's condition by reducing the number of bad sectors.

Summary of Bad Sector Repair

To fix bad sectors on an HDD, you can use the Windows CHKDSK command or Qiling free partitioning software. These tools allow you to efficiently remove bad sectors from the hard drive, including external storage devices, and repair any damaged areas, helping to restore the drive to a healthy state.

If you find bad sectors on your hard drive, it's almost impossible to repair it if they're physical, and you'll need to replace it with a new one. To avoid data loss, use a disk clone software like Qiling to copy and make a backup of your data as soon as you discover bad sectors.

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More Information About Bad Sectors

Some people may also have questions about diagnosing bad sectors on their drive. To determine if bad sectors are present, you can look for two key factors:

1. What are the symptoms of bad sectors?

If your hard drive or external storage devices show symptoms such as clicking, grinding, or whirring noises, or if you experience frequent system crashes, blue screens, or file corruption, it may indicate the presence of bad sectors on your storage devices.

Strange friction sound when booting or running hard drive.
The system displays an error message, such as "Sector not found" or "General error in reading drive C", indicating a problem with accessing a specific sector or drive.
Disk won't format, getting an error.
Scandisk, a diagnostic utility, automatically runs when the system is booted.
Some operations are experiencing issues or behaving unpredictably with a particular process.

2. What are the causes of hard bad sectors?

1. A hard drive was shipped from the factory with bad sectors, similar to a solid state drive (SSD) issue.

2. Physical damage, like:

Manufacturing error
Accidental drop, break, etc.
The touch of the hard drive header to the platter
Dust

3. What are the causes of soft bad sectors

Software issue, like:

Sudden shutdown of the computer
Sectors that contain data don't match the error-correction code
Viruses, malware messes computers, cause bad sectors.

4. How to avoid bad sectors?

To protect your drive from bad sector errors, you can use the built-in tool in Windows called "chkdsk" to scan and fix errors on your drive. You can also use third-party software like CCleaner or Disk Cleanup to remove temporary files and free up space on your drive. Additionally, you can use the "S.

Run a disk check or CHKDSK command on your drive periodically to remove soft bad sectors, which can cause issues and slow down your system.
Run virus cleaner software to remove viruses and malware.
To ensure your computer's drive is properly shut down, it's recommended to close all running programs before shutting down the computer. This helps prevent any potential data loss or corruption and ensures a smooth shutdown process.