How to Fix Bad Sectors on Your Computer

Many PC users may come across error messages indicating "bad sectors" on their computers and not know how to fix them. Fortunately, a bad sector is not a lost sector there are ways to save them.

A bad sector, also known as a "surface defect", is simply a sector on a computer's disk drive that is physically damaged and therefore unable to be read. Usually, it is detected by the SCANDISK or CHKDSK utilities software that your operating system is equipped with. When SCANDISK or CHKDSK find the bad sectors on your drive, they mark them so that the operating system will skip them in the future. This is known as standard disk repair.

Once the bad sector is marked, the disk controller will remap the logical sector to a different area on the hard drive. Since the drive has many spare sectors, the only reason the operating system would detect a bad sector would be if the surface of the disk drive was failing. If this happens, it means the drive has run out of spare sectors and can no longer remap bad ones. This is very bad news for your operating system.

There are several common symptoms of bad sectors. One is the system blue screen. This is when your monitor screen suddenly turns blue duing the middle of an operation. Often, this is because your system is unable to read a sector. Another symptom is constant system freezes. This occurs because the operating system is unable to access the sector information it needs to load a page or open a file. Other symptoms include: "drive not formatted" error, "drive or device not found", or "operating system not found". All of these error messages are signs that your computer system's registry and memory are corrupted and need a fix.

If system structures like the FAT are affected by bad sectors, it could cause your computer to freeze or even crash. That is where registry cleaners comes in. Registry scanning software addresses sectors below the the file system, enabling it to detect the bad sectors that SCANDISK and CHKDSK cannot reach. The advantage is that the disk management system can then go back to reallocating spare sectors where they are needed.

Registry cleaning software can fix bad sectors by locating them at the source where basic utilities cannot. Most registry cleaning programs are designed specifically to address the needs of the Windows operating system. Many computers have overloaded registries and need to be protected from the failures caused by bad sectors. Registry cleaners safely and effectively scan your computer's hard drive for bad sectors, detect them, and then automatically fix them. If you wish to manually go through your computer's registry and clean it according to your specifications, most software has a user-friendly interface also allows you to do that.