Best Bad Sector Repair Solutions: How to Check and Remove Bad Sectors on Hard Drive

Updated by Linda on Dec 27, 2021, about Disk/Partition Clone | How-to Guide

Can bad sectors be repaired? To find out, try running a disk error checking tool to determine how many bad sectors are detected. A surface test run by the disk error checking tool can also help identify whether bad sectors are hard or soft damaged. You can use a disk cloning tool to skip over bad sectors and replace a physically damaged hard drive. If there are not many bad sectors, you can also use alternative methods like #MHDD# to repair them.

How to Check Bad Sectors on an HDD or SSD

Bad sectors are areas on a computer or external hard drive, SD card, USB flash drive, or pen drive that cannot be accessed or written to. A large number of bad sectors can lead to severe consequences, including system freezing, weird noises, inability to format, or blue screen issues. Besides, files on bad sectors will be unreadable or even corrupted. If you need more information about the two types of bad sectors – hard/physical bad sectors and soft/logical bad sectors, check out the article on how to repair bad sectors in Windows 10/8/7 to learn some basics.

To check for bad sectors on your hard drive, you'll need a free tool to assist you. The reputable and highly recommended Free Partition Manager software has been trusted by millions of users. With its comprehensive surface test, the software will list the number of bad sectors found and aid in locating physically damaged sectors.

Step 1: Launch Partition Assistant, right click the hard drive which you want to check and then choose “Advanced” > “Surface Test”.

Step 2: The operation will be performed immediately and all bad sectors will be marked in red.

How to protect data on bad sectors

Note that bad sectors are contagious, which means that when you find some, there are two right ways to deal with them.

Option 1: Replace the failed hard drive as soon as possible and recover the data.

If the number of bad sectors exceeds your expectation and Partition Master reports an emergency, don't waste time searching for a solution to fix bad sectors. The only solution, if the bad sectors are due to physical damage, is to back up the hard drive and replace it. This is the safest way to ensure that your data on the hard drive does not suffer further damage before it's too late.

Here, we recommend you try a powerful disk cloning software - Disk Copy, which is fully compatible with all operating systems. You can use this software in the WinPE environment to help you upgrade and clone a bad sector hard drive to a new one. In this way, you don't need to worry about reinstalling applications and the OS. Most importantly, it allows you to salvage as much data as possible on the new drive.

Step 1: On a healthy Windows computer, download, install, and run the Disk Copy utility. Connect an external storage device, such as a USB flash drive or an external hard drive, to the computer. Click “Create a bootable disk.”

Step 2. Select the USB option, choose your device, and click "Create."

Once that's done, you'll have a bootable CD.

Step 3. Connect the bootable USB drive and the new SSD/HDD to the computer whose disk you want to clone. Set your computer to boot from the bootable drive by changing the boot order in the BIOS.

4. In Disk Utility, click on "Disk Copy," then select the source disk that you want to copy or clone. Click "Continue" to proceed.

Step 5: Select the target disk to which you wish to clone/copy your old disk, then click “Next” to proceed. If prompted to confirm erasing data from the target disk, click “OK”.

Step 6. Review and edit the disk layout, choosing to either "Autodetect disk size," "Copy source to target," or "Edit disk layout." It is recommended that you choose "Autodetect disk size."

• Select the “Copy as source” option to copy/cloning the partition layout of the source disk to the target disk. • Editing the disk layout allows you to manually adjust the size or location of partitions on the target disk. • If the target disk is an SSD, remember to check the box “If target is SSD then select this option.”

Click “Continue” to begin the disk cloning or disk copying process.

The second is to find a reliable bad sector repair software to fix the bad sector problem once and for all.

The most effective way to remove or repair bad sectors is to overwrite the hard drive with zeros and perform a low-level format. This, however, will result in permanent data loss that cannot be recovered. Hence, you should be prepared with a viable solution to eliminate bad sectors on your HDD without compromising the health and data on it. Perform a disk cloning to transfer the data from the bad sectors to another drive as soon as possible.

Bad Sector Repair Tool: How to Remove Bad Sectors

If you haven't reached the day when you need to clone a hard drive with bad sectors yet, take a breath. Bad sectors caused by software corruption affecting the MBR (Master Boot Record) can be easily fixed with powerful bad sector repair tools like MHDD. MHDD is one of the most popular free HDD low-level diagnostic utilities that can perform precise diagnostics on the mechanical parts of your drive, view SMART attributes, perform low-level formatting, bad sector repairing, different tests, and dozens of other features.

Refer to the MHDD documentation (linked here) on how to use it to repair bad sectors.

Are there any other acceptable bad block deletion solutions?

In addition to the automated approach of using a third-party bad sector repair utility, there are manual methods you can try.

For Windows 10/8 users:

1. Open "This PC" and right-click on the system drive, then select "Properties." 2. Go to the "Tools" tab and click on "Check." 3. Under "Error Checking," click "Check." 4. Review the scan results and click "Scan and repair drive." 5. Choose when to fix the file system. 6. Wait for Windows 10/8 to scan and repair bad sectors on the hard drive.

Fixing Bad Sectors on Windows 7:

1. Open "My Computer" > Right-click the hard drive you want to check for bad sectors, and select "Properties." 2. In the "Properties" window, click "Tools" > Click "Check" under the "Error Checking" section. 3. Click "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" > Click "Start." 4. Review the disk checking report.