Bad Sector Repair: How to Fix Bad Sectors on HDD in Windows 10/8/7

Linda Updated on Sep 14, 2021 to Disk/Partition Clone|User Guide

Please provide the English content you would like translated, and I will do my best to translate it into Chinese.

What should you do when your hard drive develops bad sectors? This guide outlines the best solutions to help you effectively fix bad sectors on your hard drive and safeguard your data.

When a hard drive encounters one or more bad sectors, it becomes damaged. When this happens, data in the bad sectors may be lost, but the rest of the data on the disk remains unaffected and the disk can still be used fully. To help you perform a bad sector repair on your HDD and save your data as soon as possible, we recommend following these tips before taking action to fix bad sectors.

Overview of Bad Sectors on Hard Drive

Before you begin, it's good to know some basics about bad sectors so that you can choose the best solution and remove bad sectors from your drive.

What is a bad sector?

According to Wikipedia and professional IT websites, a bad sector is defined as a permanently damaged storage unit on a hard drive. Once a sector goes bad, all the information stored in that area is lost. Normally, operating systems like Windows 10/8/7 detect and mark bad sectors, subsequently avoiding them.

Two types of bad sectors

Bad sectors on a hard drive can be of two types: hard bad sectors (also called physical bad sectors) and soft bad sectors (also called logical bad sectors).

Bad sectors can be categorized into two types: hard bad sectors and soft bad sectors. Hard bad sectors are primarily caused by physical damage, such as manufacturing defects or physical harm to the disk. On the other hand, soft bad sectors are typically associated with software issues, like improper disk operations or file system errors.

Since bad sectors can be caused by various reasons, the ways to fix them also vary. Read on and you will find the best solutions to fix bad sectors on hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.

How to Check Bad sectors on Hard Drive in Windows 10/8/7

While we've explained that bad sectors can be defined as physical and logical, you might still not know how to tell them apart. There's a simple rule to know the difference: whether or not you can check for bad sectors on the drive.

If you were able to run a disk check and get basic information about bad sectors, you probably just have soft bad sectors. If not, the situation is worse, and you might be looking at hard bad sectors.

To have a clearer understanding of the bad sectors, we recommend a professional yet free disk management tool - AOMEI Partition Assistant Free. It can easily and freely detect bad sectors on Windows 10/8/7 system hard drive with one click.

In addition, it comes with comprehensive hard disk partition options, such as resizing/moving partitions, creating, merging, formatting, and wiping partitions. You can also use it to convert FAT32 to NTFS without losing data, or vice versa, convert MBR disks to GPT, or the other way around.

< strong > Step 1. Launch Partition Master. Right-click the disk that you wish to check and click “Advanced” > “Surface Test”.

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

If there are too many bad sectors, the scanning process will be stuck. Please wait patiently. After it's done, it will display the number of bad sectors.

How to Fix Bad sectors on a Hard Drive in Windows 10

As you know, both logical and physical bad sectors will be marked as unusable once detected by the operating system. Hence, data loss and disk capacity loss are inevitable. Then, how to fix and remove bad sectors on hard drive? Read on for an in-depth tutorial.

The first order of business: back up and clone the HDD to a good one, skipping bad sectors.

If there are too many bad sectors on the disk, or if your computer frequently hangs or runs slowly when reading data, or if the hard drive is damaged due to physical bad sectors, then the bad sectors are irreparable. In this case, your best bet is to back up and save your data as soon as possible. But how do you copy a hard drive with bad sectors?

AOMEI Backupper Disk Copy, a powerful disk cloning software, can skip bad sectors and clone the disk for an entire hard drive duplication.

Some key features of a disk cloning tool include:

• Migrate OS to new hard drive without reinstalling Windows and apps
• Clone larger HDD to smaller SSD
• Easily clone hard drive to USB flash drive

Download and apply this disk cloning software to upgrade and clone HDD with bad sectors to a healthy one without hassle.

If your computer won't boot the operating system, create a bootable USB drive ahead of time, and then follow these steps to copy over your data. Make sure to connect the new hard drive to your computer as a secondary storage device.

Step 1: Choose “Disk Mode” and select the smaller disk as the source disk.

Step 2: Select the larger hard drive to save data, then click “Next”.

Step 3: A warning will appear, stating that all data on the target disk will be erased. If there is no important data on the target disk, click “OK” to proceed.

Step 4: Change the disk layout if needed, and click “Continue” to proceed.

• "Auto Resize partitions": Resizes the layout according to the size of the target disk for optimized performance. • "Copy as source disk": Leaves all settings unchanged and creates the same layout as the source disk. • "Edit partition layout": Allows you to manually adjust/move the partition layout of the target disk.

Step 5: Wait for the process to complete.

When the cloning is finished, shut down your computer, install the newly upgraded drive into your computer in place of the old one, and boot up. If it's a system drive, you may have to set your computer in the BIOS to boot from the new drive rather than the old one.

Fixing Bad Sectors on Windows

If you have one or more bad sectors on your hard drive that are still accessible, you can fix the issue by following our instructions and using a bad sector repair tool to permanently remove the bad sectors from your hard drive.

< strong > 1. Run the CHKDSK command and format the hard drive

If you have only a few bad sectors on your disk, you can run the CHKDSK command and format the disk to fix these bad sectors.

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

1. Press the Windows key, then type cmd.

2. Right-click “Command Prompt” and select “Run as administrator.”

3. Type in chkdsk E: /f /r /x and press Enter. (Replace "E" with the letter of your hard drive.)

Step 2: Format the hard drive for reuse

1. Open File Explorer and right-click your hard drive.

2. Select "Format", reset the file system to NTFS, check "Quick Format", and then click "Start".

Then, you can save the data back to disk for reuse.

2. Use a free disk checking and repair tool to fix bad sectors

Disk Management is the simplest way to check and fix hard drive errors. You can use its “Check File System” option to scan and fix errors on a hard drive partition in Windows 10.

On Windows 10, 8, or another version of Windows, it's just one click away. Download and launch a partition manager, find your hard drive, and run the Check File System utility.

Fixing Hard Drive / Physical Bad Sectors

Most of the time, if your hard drive has bad sectors, they can't be repaired with regular methods. The only possible way is to low-level format the disk, which resets the disk blocks, clusters, and sectors.

Low-level formatting is also called physical formatting. Most modern hard drives are low-level formatted at the factory and can never be low-level formatted again without destroying the drive. This means bad sectors cannot be repaired.

There are two ways to address this.

1. Send the hard drive back to the manufacturer or a local repair center and ask for a low-level format.

2. Choose to clone a hard drive with bad sectors to a good one to prevent the bad sectors from increasing.

Bad Sector Repair Overview

This page offers a comprehensive guide on how to fix bad sectors on HDD. To permanently remove bad sectors from your hard drive, you can use the Windows CHKDSK command or a free partition software tool. With these two bad sector repair utilities, you can effectively fix and recover bad sectors on both hard drives and external storage devices.

Unlike logical bad sectors, physical bad sectors are almost impossible to fix. You will need to replace your hard drive. Because of this, it's important to clone your hard drive and back up your data as soon as you discover bad sectors to prevent data loss.

More information about bad sectors

One may still ask, how to determine if there are bad sectors on a hard drive. You can judge from the following two aspects:

1. What are the common symptoms of bad sectors?

When you experience any of the following symptoms, your hard drive or external storage device might have bad sectors:

• You hear strange grinding noises when the hard drive starts up or runs.
• Error messages pop up, such as "Sector not found" or "Error reading Drive C."
• The disk fails to format and returns an error.
• A disk scan (a diagnostic tool) runs automatically when you start up your system.
• Certain operations hang or become erratic during specific processes.

What causes bad sectors on a hard drive?

1. The hard drive has bad sectors from the factory. (For example, an SSD)

2. Physical harm, such as:

• Manufacturing defects
• Accidental drops and damage
• HDD read/write head touching the disk
• Dust

3. What causes a soft bad sector?

• Software issues, such as:

• The computer shuts down abruptly. • The sectors containing data do not match the error-checking code. • A virus or malware infection may have caused bad sectors on the computer.

How to avoid bad sectors?

Some of you might be interested in how to prevent bad sectors from appearing on your disk. Here are a few suggestions:

Run regular disk checks or the CHKDSK command on your hard drive to get rid of bad sectors. Scan your system with antivirus software to remove viruses and malware. Handle your hard drive properly, like closing all running programs before shutting down your computer.