How to Fix Bad Sectors in Hard Drive Partitions and Recover Lost Files

A bad sector is a cluster of storage space of the hard drive that appears to be defective and doesn’t respond to read and write requests. There are two types of bad sectors: physical bad sector and logical bad sector. Physical bad sector means the cluster of storage space is physically damaged and can’t be repaired. Logical bad sector is often detected because the system finds the content of the sector doesn’t match the error-correcting code, which may indicate something is wrong. Logical bad sector is also called soft bad sector because it can often be repaired by using disk repairing utilities.

Recover Data from Hard Drive with Bad Sectors

Bad sectors may occur to both HDD and SSD drives. When bad sector error occurs in your PC hard drive partition, you may at the risks of losing data. So how to fix the bad sector error and get lost data back?

It is highly recommended that you restore lost data from bad sector infected hard drives first before we get down to fix any problems.  Professional data recovery software will work to help you find lost data from bad sectors. Here we recommend you to try H Data Recovery Software which supports data recovery from hard drive partitions with bad sectors. Besides restoring data from bad sectors in hard drive partitions, H Data Recovery software also works efficiently on USB flash drive recovery and external hard drive recovery issues.

Fix the Bad Sectors

Windows has a built-in Error-checking tool that can scan your hard drives for bad sectors, marking physical bad sectors so it will be skipped and repairing logical bad sectors to make them usable again.

For Windows 10/8 users:

• Open This PC and right-click on the drive you want to scan and choose Properties;
• Go to Tools and click Check;
• Under Error checking, click on Check;
• Review the scan result and click Scan and repair drive
• The error checking scan will tell you either that there are errors or there aren’t errors. You can still repair the drive, even if there are no errors

For Windows 7 users:

• Open Computer and right-click the hard drive you want to check for bad sectors and select Properties;
• In Properties window, click Tools and click Check now in the Error-checking section;
• Click Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors, then click Start;
• Windows will start checking your hard drive for bad sectors and will fix any that it finds.

If you have all your important files backed up and stored safely away, you can also perform a full format on the hard drive. A full format will scrub through the hard drive from scratch, rebuild all of its file structures, and scans the drive for bad sectors. If any bad sector is detected, it will be updated into the bad sector list so that the system will cease from writing to this particular region. If you are dealing with a partition that was formatted by using the Quick format option, you can check your hard drive by using the chkdsk /r command after the quick format.