How to Fix Bad Sectors on Your Hard Drive

A hard disk is comprised of several sectors where data is allocated. However, these sectors are vulnerable to damage and can be a primary cause of massive lost of data.

One way of fixing bad sectors on a hard disk is to reformat the entire drive. But it will not stay the same as always, there are dependencies why sometimes this would or would not work.

Newer drives are being released today with accompanying extra sectors. These are wise methods of providing fallback options for minor defective hard drives.

Using the Windows Interface, you can check for drive errors and bad sectors on the disk. You can do this by opening My Computer.

1. Right Click the Disk to check for errors and click on properties.

2. Click on Tools Tab

3. Under Error Checking, click on Check now.

Different versions of windows will bring you different interfaces, but the logic is the same. It will check for disk errors - the bad sectors I am talking about that the operating system tries to avoid. An operating system will not use a bad sector to write files, thus lowering the storage capacity of your hard drive.

There are several causes of bad sectors on a hard drive, branching from software errors to physical damage.

The first are software errors. Sometimes your computer will crash and show you a blue screen with a fatal error report. These problems leads to disk errors and the file system labeling them as bad sectors.

Since the operating system does not read or write on bad sectors, files on previously good sectors are technically lost, and even for recovery software, it would be hard to salvage these files.

Another cause of bad sectors is physical damage. When parts tore off from the inside of the disk, due to possibly a drop, or hard impact, these fragments remains inside and risks collision with the working parts. The disk is then in danger of developing further bad sectors.

As said above, a solution to fix bad sectors is to reformat the hard drive. It'a always good practice to backup what files that have not been corrupted before reformatting.

After a reformat, the bad sectores will be replaced with the extra sectors that come with the disk. As these sectors run out, the hard drive will eventually die.

If the problem was caused by physical damaged, expect the disk to work only as long, and start backing up your files more often, or much better if you consider getting a newer drive.