A cyclic redundancy check is a way your computer verifies data stored on your hard disks. However, when there is a bad sector on your drive, the cyclic redundancy check may throw an error. As a result of this error, your drive may become inaccessible.
Although bad sectors are the main reason for the cyclic redundancy error, there may be other reasons such as severe fragmentation in the hard disk or improper installation of programs.
The cyclic redundancy error if not immediately addressed can lead to system failure and data loss and hence this error requires immediate action. This article provides some simple solutions that you can use to resolve this error. The first step involves recovering data from the drive which is showing an error and the second step involves using the CHKDSK tool that addresses the error.
- Recover data using Hi5 Software
Before proceeding to use CHKDSK to fix the error, it is recommended that you recover data from the drive in question. For this purpose, you can use a tool called Hi5 hard drive recovery software. It is a great choice to recover data from corrupt drives or even from drives with bad sectors.
If there are bad sectors on the drive, what Hi5 does is it skips these sectors and creates a disk image of the drive. Once a disk image is created, the image can be used to retrieve necessary data.
After data is recovered, you can go ahead and perform CHKDSK using the steps below.
- Run CHKDSK
CHKDSK is a great built-in tool to check the integrity of file systems and resolve any errors associated with it. It has the ability to repair corruptions that may be causing the cyclic redundancy error. To run CHKDSK, follow the steps below.
- Right click on the drive that you want to perform CHKDSK on
- Click Properties > Tools
- Click on Check Now under the Error Checking tab
- Check both the options for automatically fix file system errors and recovery of bad sectors and click Start
It may take a while for CHKDSK to complete the scanning process and once it does, restart your computer. However, if you’re unable to run CHKDSK using the right click method described above, there is also a provision to run the tool using a command prompt.
- Click on Windows + X and open Command Prompt
- In the command prompt, type ‘CHKDSK <your drive letter>: /F’ and click Enter
- Once CHKDSK is complete, restart your computer
CHKDSK will attempt to repair all the errors in your drive and also attempt recovery from bad sectors. But even if the drive is repaired using CHKDSK, there is no guarantee that the error will not appear again. So it is best you make a backup of everything on the drive and replace the drive. It may not be a very good idea to trust this drive with your data on it.
Precautions
You can think of cyclic redundancy check error like a warning message. If you already have a backup of your data, well and good! However, if you haven’t been backing up data, now is a good time to start making it a habit.
