Western Digital Hard Drive Repair Tool | Fix WD HDD Without Data Loss

phalted by Tracy King on Sep 14, 2021 , Category: Disk/Partition Clone | How-to Guides

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WD (Western Digital) hard drives are one of the popular hard drives across the globe. When bad sectors appear on the disk, especially on WD My Passport, it may lead to drive crashes/failures, performance degradation, data loss disasters, system boot issues, and more. If your WD HDD has bad sectors, it can be very troublesome and annoying.

Read this guide to learn how to check for bad sectors on a Western Digital hard drive and replace a WD HDD without losing data. Also, we'll introduce three simple WD HDD repair tools and solutions to effectively fix a damaged WD HDD.

Part 1: How to Check Bad Sectors on WD Hard Drive

When you come across bad sectors on your WD HDD, the first thing you need to do is understand the situation. You need to check the bad sectors.

To check for bad sectors on your hard drive, you can use a free tool like the free partition software or Western Digital Data Lifeguard. Choose one to scan your hard drive and see how many bad sectors it finds.

1. Check Bad Sectors on WD HDD with Free Partition Manager

The free partition manager, trusted and recommended by millions of users, features a disk surface test that can check bad sectors on hard drives, USB flash drives, pen drives, SD memory cards, and other storage devices without formatting. The disk surface test will identify bad sectors by scanning the hard drive.

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

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

Upon detecting bad sectors, it will mark them in red and prevent the operating system from using them, thus protecting your saved data. From the test results, you can know how many bad sectors exist on your WD hard drive.

2. Use Western Digital Data Lifeguard to Check Bad Sectors

Many users mistakenly consider Western Digital Data Lifeguard as a bad sector repair tool since it can detect existing bad sectors on WD HDD and other types of storage devices.

Its Extended Test function, in fact, can only be used to detect bad sectors, and the test may take several hours depending on the size of the hard disk (not as efficient as Partition Master).

Step 1: Download Data LifeGuard Diagnostics (WinDlg_124.zip), and then extract WinDlg.exe from the ZIP file.

Step 2. Right-click on WinDlg.exe and select Run as administrator.

Step 3. Check the box next to “I accept this license agreement” and click on “Next” to continue. This will make the program detect the hard drives installed on your computer.

Step 4: Select and highlight the hard drive you wish to test, then click the “Run Test” button.

(5) In the DLGDIAG utility, select Option, then Extended Test.

Use Western Digital Data Lifeguard to detect bad sectors

Step 6: Click “Start,” and wait for the test to finish.

Step 7. Close the test window, and click “View Test Results” in the new pop-up.

Part 2: How to Fix Bad Sectors on WD Hard Drive Without Losing Data

Upon completion of the bad sector detection on the hard disk, you can choose different handling methods according to the number of bad sectors.

1. Perform low-level formatting on the WD HDD to fix bad sectors.

If bad sectors are detected on a WD hard drive, you can try low-level formatting to remove or fix the bad sectors. This will regenerate the disk layout and structure. However, it will inevitably result in massive data loss, and it's not an operation that regular users can perform.

A better solution would be to replace the problematic WD drive, as described here. But if you insist, you could back up your data to another drive and then have the disk low-level formatted at a local repair shop or by the manufacturer.

2. Replace the Western Digital hard drive with bad sectors with a new one

If the damage is severe, bad sectors cannot be repaired. In this case, your best option is to replace the damaged WD hard drive with a new one.

To avoid data loss, we suggest you use a powerful disk cloning software - AOMEI Backupper Standard to help you directly clone WD HDD to new hard drive for hard drive replacement. This powerful disk cloning tool allows you to clone a bad sector hard drive, unbootable hard drive, clone HDD to M.2 SSD, and more.

Video Tutorial: Disk Cloning

For disk cloning, the video has the detailed information you need. Watch the video tutorial to learn how to replace a bad Western Digital hard drive with a good one.

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Before you begin, connect the new, healthy hard drive to your computer as a secondary storage device. Using a utility like Disk Copy will allow you to clone the drive and skip over bad sectors, migrating only the good data to the new disk.

Step 1: Download, install, and run the Disk Copy utility on your computer.

Click “Disk Mode,” then select the hard drive you want to copy or clone. Click “Next” to continue.

Step 2: Select the target disk.

Note: If you are copying or cloning a source disk, the target disk must be at least as large as the source disk, or larger.

Step 3: If prompted, confirm that you want to erase the data on the target disk.

Step 4: Review and edit the disk layout.

If your target disk is an SSD, make sure to check the “Target is SSD” box.

Step 5: Click “Continue” to start the hard drive cloning process.

All you need to do is wait for the process to finish. You can apply and activate this software to help you upgrade and clone a hard drive with bad sectors, as well as recover data as much as possible.

When the clone is finished, shut down your computer, install the upgraded drive in your machine in place of the old Western Digital drive, and set your BIOS to boot from the new drive rather than the old one. You'll then have your precious data back.

Part 3: 3. Western Digital Hard Drive Repair Tools and Solutions for Damaged Drives

Bad sectors refer to physical damage on an HDD that is irreparable. However, logical damage to a hard drive due to reasons like a corrupted file system can be fixed. Here are three methods to fix a damaged WD HDD.

1. Run a disk check in File Explorer

Step 1: Open File Explorer and right-click on the WD hard drive partition. Select “Properties.”

Click the Tools tab, and then click Check Now in the upper half of the window. Click either “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” or “Automatically fix file system errors.”

2. Run the CHKDSK command and format the hard drive

Step 1. Run the CHKDSK command to fix bad sectors.

1. Press the Windows key, then type cmd. 2. Right-click “Command Prompt,” then click “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 drive for reuse

1. Open File Explorer on Windows and right-click your hard drive. 2. Select "Format," reset the file system to NTFS, check "Quick format," then click "Start."

3. Use an Alternative CHKDSK Utility - Partition Master Free

The "Check File System" feature in the tool is a free alternative to the CHKDSK command. You can also use this to fix logical bad sectors on your WD HDD.

Please refer to the full guide on how to use a partition manager tool's check file system feature to fix the corrupted WD HDD.

In summary

This article mainly introduces how to check bad sectors on WD hard drive and how to fix bad sectors on WD hard drive.

• You can try using the "Surface Test" in the Partition Master tool or run the "Extended Test" in Western Digital Data Lifeguard to detect bad sectors. • To protect your hard drive from bad sectors and prevent data loss, it's best to clone your bad sector WD hard drive to another healthy hard drive.

Lastly, you can learn three useful methods to repair a damaged hard drive by checking and repairing the file system. Hopefully, these guides will come in handy.