What to do when your hard drive has bad sectors? This guide presents the best solutions for effectively repairing bad sectors on your hard drive and safeguarding your crucial data.

When a hard drive develops one or more bad sectors, it becomes damaged. Data within those sectors may be lost, but the rest of the data on the hard drive is unaffected and the drive can still be used entirely. This wikiHow article will teach you how to scan for and repair bad sectors on a computer hard drive. Let's get started!

Before you delve into the details of the subject, let's see what you need to prepare.

Download this excellent disk cloning software here.

Overview of Hard Disk Bad Sectors

Before you begin, it's essential to know some basics about bad sectors to choose the best solution and delete bad sectors from your hard drive.

What is bad debt?

According to Wikipedia and professional IT sites, a bad sector is a permanently damaged storage unit on a hard drive that cannot be read or written to normally. Once a sector goes bad, all the information stored in that area is lost. Normally, operating systems like Windows 10/8/7 will skip bad sectors after detecting and marking them.

Two bad sectors

Bad sectors are generally of two types: hard bad sectors (also called physical bad sectors) and soft bad sectors (also called logical bad sectors).

Bad sectors can be classified into two types: physical or hard bad sectors, and logical or soft bad sectors. Physical bad sectors are primarily caused by physical damage, such as manufacturing defects or damage to the disk, as mentioned in points 1 and 2. Logical bad sectors, on the other hand, are usually related to software issues, such as improper hard drive handling or file system errors, as mentioned in point 3.

Since bad sectors can be caused by various factors, the solutions to fix them are also diverse. Read on, and you will find the best solutions to fix bad sectors on a hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.

Also read:

How to Change a Laptop Hard Drive and Reinstall the Operating System

How to Fix Bad Sectors on an HDD in Windows 10

As you know, when the operating system detects bad sectors, whether they are logical or physical bad sectors, it marks them as unusable. Hence, data loss and disk capacity loss are inevitable. So, how to fix and remove bad sectors from the hard drive? Read on for an in-depth tutorial to learn the entire fixing process.

The first order of business: back up and clone the HDD to another good drive, skipping over bad sectors.

If there are too many bad sectors on the hard drive, and it constantly gets stuck or loads data slowly on your computer, or the drive is damaged due to physical bad sectors, then these bad sectors can't be fixed. The sensible thing to do would be to back up all the data first and save it to a USB flash drive or external hard drive. But how to copy a hard drive with bad sectors?

AOMEI Backupper Disk Clone, a powerful disk cloning tool for Windows 11/10/8/7, can skip bad sectors and clone the disk to perfectly replicate your hard drive. Hence, it helps you clone a hard drive with bad sectors. Furthermore, it enables you to clone a hard drive for backup and restoration without the hassle of replacing a laptop hard drive without losing data.

Some key features to look for in disk cloning software include:

• Can be used as bad sector repair software
• Resize partitions during cloning
• Easily clone hard drive to USB flash drive
• Clone larger HDD to smaller SSD
• Migrate operating system to new hard drive without reinstalling Windows and apps, transfer OS to new hard drive

Download and use this disk cloning software to upgrade and clone the HDD with bad sectors to a healthy one without hassle.

If your computer won't boot the operating system, create a bootable USB drive ahead of time, and follow these steps to copy over your data instead. Make sure to connect the new hard drive to your computer as a secondary storage device.

Step 1: Choose “Disk Mode,” and then select the smaller disk as the source disk.

Step 2: Select the larger hard drive to save your data, then click “Next.”

Step 3: Modify the disk layout if desired, and click “Proceed.”

• "Fit to disk automatically": Adjusts the layout according to the target disk size for optimal performance. • "Copy from source disk": Leaves the target disk unchanged, with the same layout as the source disk. • "Edit disk layout": Allows you to manually adjust/move partition layout on the target disk.

Step 4: A warning message appears, informing you that data on the target disk will be erased. If there is no important data on the target disk, click “OK” to proceed.

Step 5: Wait for the process to complete.

When the cloning is complete, shut down your computer, install the upgraded drive into your machine in place of the old one, and boot up. If this is your system drive, you may need to configure your BIOS to boot from the new drive rather than the old one.

Fixing Bad Sectors on Windows (Soft or Logical Bad Sectors)

If you have one or more bad sectors on your hard drive but it's still accessible, follow our instructions to fix the issue and use a bad sector repair tool to permanently remove bad sectors from your HDD.

1. Run the CHKDSK command and format your hard drive

If there are only a few bad sectors on the disk, you can run the CHKDSK command and format the disk to fix these bad sectors:

Step 1. Run the CHKDSK command to fix disk errors.

1. Press the ⊞ Win key, then type cmd.

2. Right-click “Command Prompt” and select “Run as administrator.”

3. Type chkdsk E: /f /r /x and press Enter. (Replace E with the letter of your hard drive.)

Step 2: Format the hard drive for reuse.

1. Open File Explorer and right-click your hard drive.

2. Select “Format,” reset the file system to NTFS, check “Quick Format,” and click “Start.”

Then you can save the results back to disk for later use.

2. Use free disk checking and repair tools to fix bad sectors

Tool Partition Manager Software provides the easiest way to check and fix hard disk errors. You can use its "Check File System" option to check and repair hard drive partition errors in Windows 10. Just download and launch the Tool Partition Manager Software, locate the hard disk, and run Check File System.

3. Use data recovery software to restore the hard drive to its previous state.

Tool Data Recovery is a professional data recovery tool that retrieves data lost due to deletion, formatting, partition loss, inability to boot, or system crash from hard drives. With this powerful yet user-friendly program, you can recover your data and restore disks to their normal state with just a few simple clicks.

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Repair hard/physical bad sectors

In most cases, bad sectors on a hard drive cannot be repaired by normal means. The only possible way is to low-level format the disk, which resets the hard drive's sectors, clusters, and tracks.

Low-level formatting is also called physical formatting. Modern hard drives are low-level formatted at the factory and cannot be low-level formatted by a personal computer without destroying the drive. This means bad sectors cannot be repaired.

There are two ways to fix this.

1. Send the hard drive to the manufacturer or a local repair center for low-level formatting.

2. Clone the bad hard drive to a good one to prevent further damage. See below for instructions.

Introduction to Bad Sector Repair

This page offers a comprehensive guide to help you fix bad sectors on your hard drive in Windows 11/10/8/7. To permanently remove bad sectors from your hard drive, you can use the CHKDSK command in Windows or a free partition software tool. With these two bad sector repair utilities, you can effectively fix and manage bad sectors on both internal hard drives and external storage devices.

Unlike logical bad sectors, physical bad sectors are almost impossible to fix. You would need to replace the hard drive. So, when you find bad sectors on a disk, it's advisable to copy and back up your data with a Disk Clone tool to prevent data loss.

Frequently Asked Questions About Bad Sector Repair

Some people may also ask how to determine whether a hard drive has bad sectors, which can be judged from the following two aspects:

1. What are the common symptoms of bad sectors?

When you experience any of the following symptoms, your hard drive or external storage device might have bad sectors:

• Unusual grinding or scraping sounds when the hard drive is starting up or running. • Pop-up messages from the system indicating "Sector Not Found" or "Read Error on Drive C." • Inability to format the disk, with error messages about disk issues. • Automatic running of disk checking utilities at startup (like Scandisk). • Certain operations getting stuck or behaving erratically during specific processes.

2. What can cause bad sectors on a hard drive?

1. The hard drive has bad sectors from the factory. (For example, an SSD)

2. Physical harm, such as:

• Disk errors during manufacturing
• Accidental drops or damage
• Contact between the hard drive's read/write heads and the platters
• Dust

What causes a soft bad sector?

• Software issues, such as:

• The computer shuts down unexpectedly
• A sector containing data does not match its error-checking code
• Viruses and malware can damage a computer, leading to bad sectors

How do I avoid bad sectors?

Some of you might also be wondering how to protect your hard drive from bad sectors. Here are a few tips:

Regularly run disk checks or the CHKDSK command to eliminate bad sectors. Run antivirus software to remove viruses and malware. Handle the drive properly, such as closing all running programs before shutting down the computer.