What do I do if my drive reports bad sectors? | Seagate UK (2024)

FAQs

Can you fix a drive with bad sectors? ›

Bad sectors can often be corrected by using a spare sector built into the drive. However, any information written to a bad sector is usually lost. There are several methods for finding and correcting bad sectors. Use the Error Checking utility built in to Microsoft Windows.

Bad sectors are a common phenomenon for HDDs. As long as the increase in the Bad sector count is not drastic, there should be no cause for concern. When a drive has bad sectors, some of the following symptoms may appear: The Bad sector count shows a value other than 0.

Method 1: Run a CHKDSK

CHKDSK is a built-in utility on the Windows PC, which allows you to perform various tasks related to hard drives. According to your specific demand, type and execute the corresponding commands. Here, you need to use the “/r” parameter to locate bad sectors and remap them to working ones.

Use chkdsk /f for reviewing and fixing structural integrity, and chkdsk /r for finding and fixing bad sectors.

A few bad sectors on drive should not be problematic, but when they are in the wrong place or in abundance, it's time to backup your data in order to avoid needing data recovery services.

Formatting a drive with bad sectors can help to mark them as unusable and prevent further damage, but it does not fix the underlying physical problem.

When there are logically bad sectors on your disk, you can directly use EaseUS Disk Copy to clone a hard drive with bad sectors in Windows. However, if there are physical bad sectors, you can only clone disks with bad sectors in WinPE with a bootable disk.

A new drive may start with some innocuous bad sectors due to manufacturing flaws. Larger patches occur throughout use, due to head crash, wear-and-tear, physical shock, or dust intrusion. On solid-state drives, flash wear or flash controller error may also cause bad sectors.

Thanks to defragmentation, you can analyze and avoid bad sectors that may cause damage if your data is stored in this area.

Will bad sectors slow a computer? ›

Method 4. Check the hard drive and fix bad sectors. Bad sector is also the fuse of hard drive slow write speed, it refers to the place where data cannot be written in the hard drive. If the bad sector isn't fixed in time, it may not only make the PC slower, but even cause problems such as computer freezes and crashes.

This idea is wrong to some extent because each hard disk has a certain number of bad sectors recorded before leaving the factory, and some even have thousands or tens of thousands of bad sectors. In comparison, one or two bad sectors discovered by users is not a problem.

When a hard drive's file system gets corrupt, and you can't access the hard disk, you can run a CHKDSK scan to repair the corrupt hard drive without formatting it. The CHKDSK command checks the file system and the file system metadata of a volume for logical and physical errors.

Disk Drill only marks these sectors as “bad” within Disk Drill and therefore it is possible to revert this and scan those sectors for additional data. There are many reasons why this can be useful especially if you have sensitive data on lightly damaged parts of the disk and you wish to recover it.

Generally, formatting a drive cannot fix bad sectors on the disk. The bad sector is a cluster of storage on your hard drive that's damaged that cannot be used to store or read data.

While some failed hard drives can be repaired, it's usually ill-advised to keep using drives once they've failed. Instead, extract your data and then replace the drive or consider a new device.

One way is to use a tool called 'Disk Check. ' This tool will scan your hard disk drive for bad sectors and attempt to repair them. Another way to test your hard disk drive for bad sectors is to use the 'chkdsk' command. This command will scan your hard disk drive for errors and attempt to fix them.