In the last few years, with the advent of technology, many start-ups and businesses came into existence. They obviously need storage devices to store their crucial data. Thus the usage of storage devices increased to a great extent.

With the over usage of devices such as hard drives, the problem of bad sectors, and HDD errors also grew. But many businessmen cannot afford to lose important files and data. So, the idea is to take regular backups to avoid unexpected data loss. 

You may be a bit confused about why you are in need to remove the bad sectors from the hard disk? Firstly, let’s learn what actually the bad sector is. What is the bad sector? As the name connotes, a bad sector is an area on the hard drive or flash drive which is inaccessible or un-writeable.

There include many reasons for the generation of bad sectors within your
hard disk. However, sometimes, such situations arise when one forgets to
take the backup, and a bad sector in the hard drive causes its breakdown. 

HDD errors and bad sectors occur mainly because of the following two reasons:

Physical / hard bad sectors are an agglomeration of sectors of the hard drive that get physically damaged. If a hard drive’s head nudges the rotating panel, that area will get damaged over time.

For example, your computer gets an abrupt jolt while its hard drive is writing or reading the data, or it gets exposed to extreme heat, or some mechanical issue arises, all these are likely to cause hard bad sectors.

As to solid-state drive, bad sectors are the repercussions of worn-out flash memory cells or other predicaments. This type of bad sector cannot be repaired at all, but it can be prevented by taking a proactive approach.

Logical/soft bad sectors are sectors on a hard drive that appear to not be working properly. When the operating system tries to read or write data stored on these sectors and finds an error correction code (ECC) that does not match the content of the sector, that alludes that something is wrong and these sectors may be termed as bad sectors.

Soft bad sectors are usually repairable by overwriting on disk with zeros, which can be done by bad sector repair software that abounds in the market.

i) Damaged Hard Disk Surface – 

The bad sector generally appears when the hard disk surface gets damaged, and the sad part is it cannot be brought back to normal condition.

Keeping the problem of bad sectors in mind, manufacturers add some reserve space, or you can say spare sectors.

So whenever a bad sector appears, it gets replaced by a properly working spare sector. But, these additional sectors are limited, and cannot cater to a large number of bad sectors. 

ii) Software error – 

Software errors can also cause bad sectors. These flaws can be fixed using error fixing and restoring the operability of bad sectors. 

Now moving further, we will be discussing the ways to fix HDD errors and to restore bad sectors. 

1- Using the Standard CHKDSK Tool – 

In Windows operating system, CHKDSK is the main tool that can be used to repair hard disk issues.  CHKDSK examines the hard disk in-depth and check the detected errors. This application:

• Scans the hard drive.
• Repairs logical sector errors.
• Marks bad sectors that cannot be repaired.
• Move data to properly working sectors that are still available on the hard disk.

To start CHKDSK make use of the Command Prompt utility. 

2- Disk Formatting – 

Sometimes complete formatting of the logical disk can also be performed. In Windows operating system, this process checks the hard disk surface and excludes the identified damaged sectors.

Windows labels certain sectors as bad sectors and then writes this information to the service data of the hard disk. Also, it doesn’t allow the usage of these sectors for writing new data. Furthermore, you can also format the system drive simultaneously while reinstalling the Windows operating system.

Hire Data Recovery Specialist to Recover Crucial Data – 

Professional data recovery companies have all the essential equipment and software to recover data from a damaged hard drive.

Their highly skilled staff performs data recovery in safe and well-equipped laboratories. Also, they understand how crucial the data is for you and make sure that no data is leaked. So, prefer hiring a Data Recovery Company to retrieve the important data from the damaged disk.