This means that it does not lose its data when the power is lost or turned off.
Either way, it is prone to developingbad sectorsfor one reason or another.
Bad sectors are bad for the health of the hard drive.
Table of Contents
What are bad sectors on a hard drive?
A hard disk stores the data on a magnetic disk.
The disk is divided into tracks, and each track is divided into sectors.
Sectors and tracks on a magnetic hard disk
Each sector stores a fixed amount of data that is accessible by humans.
Previously, each sector consisted of 512 bytes.
However, the more modern hard drives and SSDs have sectors of 4096 bytes.
Open Disks volumes settings
Bad sectors can occur fromphysical damageorlogical damage.
Usually, data from physically damaged disks isnt possible.
On SSDs, bad sectors can result from flash memory degradation, over-provisioning, or improper alignment.
Open disk properties
Data from logical bad sectors can often be recovered, and such sectors can also often be fixed.
Logical bad sectors are repairable by overwriting sectors with zeros, which erases the data permanently.
Scratches to the hard drives disk from the head of the actuator arm also classify as physical damage.
View hard disk health in Windows 11 Settings
Moreover, magnetic damage can also occur which disrupts the alignment of the magnetic coating on the disk.
A disk can also develop bad sectors because of overheating.
Sudden power failure
Sudden power disruption and electronic spikes can damage the hard drive permanently.
Open partition properties
rig aging
rig aging is a natural phenomenon that affects all electronic devices.
Every piece of hardware has a life, whether it has moving or static parts.
Therefore, the older the hard drive, the more likely it is to develop bad sectors.
Check drive for bad sectors from File Explorer
Virus
Strong malware and viruses have the potential to damage hard disk data.
Hard drive bad sectors can be because of internal hard drive damage, which is because of data corruption.
That said, sometimes bad sectors go undetected.
Scan the drive
However, there is only one way to be certain; check the hard drive for bad sectors.
However, the information is only in percentages and does not disclose whether it has bad sectors or not.
ClickStorage.launch the Storage prefs page
Expand Advanced storage prefs and click Disks & volumes under it.
Obtain hard drive status through Command Prompt
ClickPropertiesin front of the disk.
Do not click Properties in front of the partition; only the disk.
Here is how:
Press theWindows key + Eto launch the File Explorer.
Repair bad sectors offline with PowerShell
Right-hit the partition and clickProperties.Open partition properties
Switch to theToolstab.
If no errors were found,closethe dialog box.
After performing the steps above, Windows will have attempted to fix the bad sectors.
Repair bad sectors with PowerShell
As mentioned earlier, they will only be fixable in case they are logical bad sectors.
Check disk health from Command Prompt
you could also check a disks health from the Command Prompt.
Its a warning that the drive should be replaced soon to prevent data loss.
Defragment the drive with bad sectors
With another command, you’re free to check and potentially repair the bad sectors on disk.
This can be done with theCHKDSKor Check Disk utility that is native to Windows.
TheCHKDSKutility is a tool that scans your hard drive for corrupted files and fixes them.
Hard Disk Sentinel
It also scans for bad sectors on the disk and attempts to repair them.
However, in such scenarios, the utility does not perform any fixes unless instructed to.
After running the command above,restart the computer.
Check and repair bad sectors with Hard Disk Sentinel
Once it reboots, the Check Disk utility will run and scan your hard drive.
it should automatically detect and attempt to repair any bad sectors.
This step can take a while, in some cases, hours.
Check and repair bad sectors with HD Tune Pro
Let the scan finish and reboot into Windows.
However, other methods attempt to repair the hard drive bad sectors as well.
These include using third-party apps, which we have discussed below, as well as other native methods.
SeaTools by Seagate
it’s possible for you to attempt to repair the bad sectors natively withPowerShelland defragmenting the drives.
Defragmenting would bring back the different parts of the documents to a single location.
This can often result in fixing bad sectors and making corrupted files often retrievable.
From the tool, snag the problematic partition and clickOptimize.
This will defragmentize the drive.
you might also repeat the steps for other drive partitions as well.
When done, check to see whether bad sectors can still be detected on the hard disk.
you’re free to also use the third-party apps discussed below for this purpose.
Here are a few of our top picks for checking and repairing bad sectors on hard drives.
Hard Disk Sentinel
Hard Disk Sentinelis my all-time favorite hard drive monitoring and troubleshooting tool.
In the tool, switch to the Error scan tab and clickStartto begin the scan.
This feature is called zero fill.
SeaTools
SeaToolsis a utility by Seagate the renowned hard disk manufacturer.
Unfortunately, the true potential of this tool is only limited to Seagate hardware.
However, certain features like health monitoring and simple scans can be performed on hard disks from other manufacturers.
Honorary mentions
The list of tools does not end here.
Some are even capable of performing the same tests on external hard drives.
Therefore, it is important to detect, and mitigate the bad sectors before they get worse.
The read and write speeds will improve, and the lag that you previously noticed may even be mitigated.
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source: www.itechtics.com
