Bad sectors are damaged spots on the drive. There are 2 types of bad sectors namely soft and hard bad sectors. Hard sectors are a result of physical damage and cannot be repaired. But soft sectors, on the other hand, are caused due to corruption or due to software issues. These bad sectors can also occur when your computer shuts down in the middle of a writing process or due to various other reasons.
Most often, when there are bad sectors on your drive, the data on that sector becomes inaccessible and unreadable. But each time your system comes across that sector, it cannot read from it and your system may freeze or hang. Hence it is important to treat these bad sectors immediately.
To treat/remove bad sectors, we provide some solutions in this article. In the first step, recover data from the drive and secondly, perform CHKDSK to fix the bad sector issue.
Step 1: Recover data from the drive with bad sectors
Before you run CHKDSK, it is advisable that you recover data from the drive with bad sectors in order to prevent data loss. Hi5 Software is a great recovery solution for this purpose.
If bad sectors are present in your drive, Hi5 Software skips those sectors and makes a disk image of the disk. This image can later be used to recover the necessary data. Please refer the link for complete details on recovering data from a drive with bad sectors.
The advantage of using Hi5 Software is that it can be used with all kinds of storage devices like external hard drives, USB flash devices and memory cards (SD, XD, CF, MMC etc).
Once data is recovered from the drive, proceed to the next step.
Step 2: Use CHKDSK, a tool for repairing your drive
What CHKDSK does is it checks the integrity of file systems and file structure? If it finds any issues, it repairs them and also scans your drive for bad sectors. If it finds any, it attempts to repair them and recover possible data from those sectors. Then it marks those sectors, so your system doesn’t keep bumping into these sectors, again and again, thus preventing problems.
How to run CHKDSK?
The CHKDSK command can be run using 2 methods; one is by right-clicking on the drive and selecting Properties > Tools. And the other method involves using the Command Prompt. To run CHKDSK using the command prompt, follow the instructions below.
- Click on Windows + X to open the power menu
- Then select Command Prompt (Admin)
- Enter your admin details and login to command prompt
- Type ‘CHKDSK X: /R’. (Please replace letter ‘X’ with the letter of your drive)
The ‘/R’ command will scan the drive for bad sectors and in addition, it will also repair file system errors in the drive. The CHKDSK scan may take a long time if the size of the drive is large and if there are a number of errors. Once the scan completes, all errors will be fixed. However, if you find CHKDSK is unable to fix the errors, it is probably time for you to discard the drive.
