Last Updated on June 16, 2020 by Ian McEwan
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*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.
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:
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.
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
Windows 7
This is how easily you can fix logical bad sectors on hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.