Bad Sector & Repairs

What is a Bad Sector?

Hard drives are contain millions of sectors. It is very normal for some of these sectors to be bad sectors, even when the drive is first manufactured.

In addition, a small number of sectors will normally go bad during the lifespan of a drive.

When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable.

A bad sector cannot be repaired, but it can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in that bad sector. The storage capacity of the disk will be decreased by the amount of storage space in the bad sector.

If your hard drive develops a bad sector, back the hard drive up immediately. If the bad sector was caused by a faulty drive head, the problem can quickly spread to other sectors on the disk.

How to "Repair" a Bad Sector in Windows XP

Occasionally one or more sectors on an otherwise good will go bad.

When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable.

Those bad sectors can not be repaired, but they can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating system know not to attempt to store data in those bad sectors. The total disk capacity will be decreased by the amount of storage space in those bad sectors.

If your hard drive is experiencing a Bad sector back it up immediately. If the bad sector was caused by a faulty drive head, the problem can spread to many other sectors across the disk.

* Press the button.
* Select .
* Under Hard Disk Drives highlight the disk which you want to scan.
* Open the menu and choose
* Open the tab.
* Click the button.

In earlier version of Microsoft Windows and DOS, this functionality was built into the `scandisk` and `chkdsk` utilities.

Once the bad sector or sectors have been "repaired", continue to back up your hard drive on a regular basis. Hard drives are mechanical devices and all mechanical devices will eventually fail.