How to Repair Bad Sectors on a Hard Drive
Your computer’s hard disk is divided into small sections of memory called sectors. Sometimes when we install some untrusted applications or other malware programs; they corrupt some chunks of hard disk also called bad sectors. Bad sector problems also arise due to failure of magnetic disk and it can damage all or part of your data. Sometimes it is very difficult to repair those bad sectors, but before giving up you should try the default bad sector repair service provided by MS Windows and Mac OS X. Following are a few steps that will explain the process to repair bad sectors.
Instructions
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1
Make sure that your computer or laptop is on and that the operating system has fully loaded up. Close all the opened applications and save all of your unsaved work. This is very important as you do not want to lose any of your important data that you might be working on.
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2
Go to “My Computer”, it will be located either on your desktop or you can go to start menu and can find it there. Open “My Computer”, it will show you your disk drives. Remember that you might have multiple hard drives and they will be partitioned in to different sizes. Thus, the computer sees these partitions as other hard drives when in fact it might just be one hard drive with many partitions on it.
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3
Right click on effected drive and click on “Properties” from the scroll down menu that pops up. This will show you all types of information about the hard drive including the free space and how large the actual drive is.
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4
Now you will be presented with a set of tabs and options, click on “Tools” tab, which will take you to error checking and other maintenance options.
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Click “Check now”, after that you will see different options to check and repair existing errors on your disk.
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You will see an option, "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors." Check the box in front of it and then press “Start”. It will take some minutes to complete the process. At the end of process you will be notified that bad sectors are repaired. Remember the time it takes to scan the hard drive can depend on the size of your actual hard drive. The larger the drive the longer it will take the operating system to scan and repair the bad sectors.
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7
If you have any difficulties then go through these instructions again from the beginning and take your time to ensure that you do not skip any particular step. If you still face issues then go online and you will find many websites and forums that discuss and deal with bad sectors on hard drives. Carefully go over previous posts as your question has probably been answered before. If you feel that you need more help then post a question on the appropriate forum and an expert user will be happy to give you further assistance.
