[4 Steps] How To Fix Bad Sectors On Hard Drive In Windows 10/8/7?

Last Updated on June 16, 2020 by Ian McEwan

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Hard drives are one of the safest data storage devices. But still, there are ways in which you will lose your hard drive data. One of the ways is the formation of bad sectors on a hard disk.

If one or more than one bad sectors appear on your hard drive, it will start behaving abnormally and all of your data present in the bad sectors will become incomplete and inaccessible or in other words, will get lost.

So here, you are going to learn an easy way to fix bad sectors on the hard drive in Windows 10/8/7 and recover data from bad sector.

What is a Bad Sector?

A bad sector is a little cluster of defective storage space on hard drive (no matter magnetic hard drives, solid-state drives/SSD, internal hard drive or external hard drive), which won’t respond to load or write requests.

 

Types of Bad Sector

Bad Sectors are classified into two sections: Physical/hard bad sectors & Logical/soft bad sectors

Hard bad sectors are mainly due to physical damage and cannot be repaired. Physical damage can be due to extreme heat or dust on the disk drive.

On the other hand, Soft bad sectors result from system error and can be repaired. Soft bad sectors appear when the hard drive faces some invisible damage due to improper PC shutdown, system crash, etc.

 

Signs: What Bad Sectors on Hard Drive Can Do to Your Daily Computing

If you are not sure that if your hard drive has bad sectors or not, then here is how you can check. Following are the symptoms of bad sectors, if you constantly keep going through them, then be sure that your hard drive has bad sectors.

1. Poor performance from the PC. Always stuck whenever you try to open multiple programs.
2. Blue Screen
3. When you try to open a file, this error occurs – “File is Corrupted“.
4. Strange noises from the Hard drive
5. Windows fail to boot
6. Data loss or file corrupt

Are you experiencing any of these problems with your computer? If yes, then it becomes really necessary to fix bad sectors on hard drive if you don’t want to lose your important data.

 

TROUBLESHOOTING: Bad Sector Repair

*Note: Hard /Physical Bad Sector cannot be fixed. So, to keep your data safe as much as possible, it’s highly advisable to take Step 1 and Step 4.

 

Step 1. Recover Data on the Bad Sector Hard Drive

Although you still got a chance to correct bad sectors later, any information written to bad sectors are usually lost or inaccessible.

So, before fixing the bad sector, you’d better recover your inaccessible, deleted or lost files on your disk to minimize the chance of data loss during the bad sector repair.

And the one and only bad sector hard drive recovery solution is to use Hard Drive Recovery software.

There are a lot of Hard Drive Recovery software in the marketplace, and Stellar Data Recovery is one of the best.

To recover data from bad sector hard drive:

• Download, install and run Stellar Data Recovery on your PC/Mac.
• After selecting All Data, Click Next > Choose Location, then select the driver with bad sector under Connected Drives.
• Click on the Scan button, and all the file will be shown after the scan.
• You can preview the file in the scan result and use the search bar to locate your lost file.
• Select the files you need and click Recover and Browse to choose a folder to save your files. Then click Start Saving to finish recovering data from hard drive with bad sector.

Note: Aside from Stellar Data Recovery, you can also try Aiseesoft Data Recovery,  Wondershare Recoverit,  EaseUs Data Recovery. All of these enable you to recover data with Zero compromise.

 

Step 2: Repair Soft Bad Sectors with Built-In Error Checking Utility

You don’t need any third party software to fix soft bad sectors in windows 10/8/7 because it has its own error checking tool- Disk Check.

Disk check helps you locate and correct hdd bad sectors automatically.

While Bad sectors may look like a big problem, its solution is short and easy. If you use Windows 10/8/7, it only takes a few steps to fix bad sectors on Hard Drive.

Here is how you can use the in-built Error checking tool of Windows 10/8/7 to fix it.

Windows 10/8

1. Go to ‘My Computer‘
2. Right click on the hard drive you want to repair and select ‘Properties‘
3. Select ‘Tools‘ and then click ‘Check‘
4. Now review the scan result and under ‘Error Checking‘, click on ‘Scan and Repair Drive (drive will be unavailable)‘
5. Choose when you want to fix the hard drive and wait for several minutes for the scanning to finish
6. After the scanning finishes, reboot your computer and the hard drive has been fixed

Windows 7

1. Open ‘Computer‘
2. Right Click on the disk drive you want to check for bad sectors and select ‘Properties‘
3. Now click on ‘Tools‘ and under ‘Error Checking‘ section, click on ‘Check Now‘
4. Now, a pop up will open, check all the boxes in the pop-up under ‘Check Disc Options‘ and click ‘Start‘ to start scanning the bad sectors in the disk drive and wait until the Scanning is finished.
5. A check disc report will appear which means your hard drive has been repaired and bad sectors have been fixed.

This is how easily you can fix logical bad sectors on hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.

 

Step 3. Check the Physical Bad Sectors on Your Hard Disk

Disk check can eliminate the soft bad sectors, but not hard bad sectors, which will never go away and will only get worse.

To check your hard drive’s health and know the amount of the hard bad sectors, you need a free partition software to help.

Let’s pick EaseUS Partition Master as an example:

1. Download, install and run the free partition manager, EaseUS Partition Master on your PC.
2. Select and right-click the disk with suspected bad sectors, click Surface test.
3. As you can see from the quadrille grid, all the bad sectors left behind after Step 2 are all marked as red.

Now, it’s time to make a decision.

Continue to use the hard drive or just replace it with a new one?

In what circumstances should I replace the hard drive with bad sector?

In fact, one or a few bad sectors is not a big deal. Because all modern hard drives have Spare sector pools for reallocation purposes.

When sectors fail while being written, the drive firmware will retire the bad sectors and activate spare sectors from the Spare sector pools.

With this bad sector swapping function, you can keep that hard drive unless more bad sectors occur.

If the amount of bad sectors reach a critical value or the disk is in serious conditions, then you should replace the drive.

 

Step 4. Backup Data and Replace Bad Sector Hard Drive

Although you can continue to load and write data from that hard disk with bad sector, your hard drive is actually beginning to wear out.

In case of any data loss due to hard drive malfunction, you’d better back up your files and replace the old drive with a new one.

To transfer your data to the new drive safely, you should use a disk cloning tool, EaseUS Disk Copy.

Just download and have it run on your PC, then follow the steps below.

1. Connect the new hard drive to the computer as a storage device.
2. Select Disk Mode from the program window, then pick the old drive as the source disk and the new one as the target disk. Click Next.
3. Click OK when the warning message “The data on the target disk/partition will be erased. Do you want to continue?”
4. Then you will have three options from the drop-down list, which are “Autofit the disk”, “Copy as the source” and “Edit disk layout”. Choose the “Autofit the disk” and click Proceed to continue.

  

The Way Forward

Whenever bad sectors appear on your hard drive in Windows 10/8/7, you can always follow the aforementioned guide to repair them. Hope you enjoyed the article and got your bad sectors repaired.

 

*FAQ About HDD Bad Sectors and Bad Sector Repair

Why My Hard Drive Gets Bad Sector？/ What are the Causes of Bad Sectors?

Bad Sectors don’t just appear and corrupt your files for no reason, there are some causes which force them to appear. Here are some of the most common causes of Bad sectors on hard drive:

1. Improper PC Shutdown
2. Malware or Virus attack
3. Dust Pollution
4. Hard drive constantly getting overheated
5. System Crash
6. Too old hardware
7. Static Electricity effect

If you take care of these things, you will maintain your computer’s health without involving too much time or resources. This way your data will stay safe from getting lost.