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The program repairs damaged hard disk sectors. How to remove bad sectors on a hard drive

This does not force developers to think through data storage down to the smallest detail. However, in actual operation of the device, all their tricks do not help.

Why do sectors deteriorate?

The operating principle of a mechanical hard drive is very simple. There are several round magnetic plates. The reading heads use them to search for the necessary information. When the hard drive mechanism is subjected to vibration or sudden shock, microscopic scratches may appear on the surface of the drive. This leads to damage to sectors and loss of data - programs, books, music or movies.


No matter how carefully you operate your PC, bad sectors may still appear on your hard drive.

If the hard drive is several years old, its seal may be compromised. Any speck of dust that gets inside is a potential cause of bad sectors.

Add to this power surges, sudden PC shutdowns and simply improper handling of the computer, and the reasons for damage to information will become much greater.

Is there a way out?

If bad sectors appear, there is no need to immediately panic and urgently change the hardware. There are ways to either mark problem areas so that they do not create problems in the future. Or fix the damage using some special programs.


When bad sectors appear, there are two ways - use the system’s own program or a third-party one.

The simplest thing you can do is run a disk surface check. To do this, you need to right-click on the failed logical partition, select “Properties”, then the “Tools” tab and “Run scan”, checking the “Scan and repair bad sectors” checkbox. The system will scan the disk, find errors and either return the sectors to working condition or mark them as bad so that the read heads bypass them and do not create “brakes” in operation.

For more “advanced” users, we can recommend the HDD-Regenerator program. It works at the physical level and helps to cope with the problem where the standard disk check program is useless. The regenerator does deep work and in most cases returns the sectors to normal. You will not lose data and will significantly increase the service life of your hard drive.

There are many other programs, even those that only real “hackers” or experienced users can understand. However, in most cases, the two products described above are sufficient. They are time-tested and have helped in many difficult cases.

In this article we will talk about recovering bad sectors of a hard drive and the reasons for their occurrence. Step-by-step instructions will help you prepare for this procedure and cope with it yourself.

What are bad sectors?

Let's take a quick look at the structure of the hard drive. It consists of several separate disks, above which there are magnetic heads designed for reading and writing information. When storing data, the heads magnetize certain areas of the disk, which is divided into tracks and smaller components - sectors.

It is in them that units of information are stored. If a sector becomes unreadable, it is called “broken”.

  • Several signs indicate the occurrence of such a problem:
  • creaks, rattles, tapping when the disk is operating;
  • heating the surface of the HDD (this should not happen under normal conditions);

Frequent errors when working and starting the operating system.

Typical reasons


The main reasons for the appearance of broken hard drive segments are:

Also, malfunctions in the hard drive may occur due to mechanical damage. They are often caused by dropping a hard drive or computer, resulting in damage to the magnetic surface (for example, during transportation).

Non-working parts also appear due to manufacturing defects. In this case, they may not appear immediately, but “crumble” over time, quickly increasing their number to a critical level.

Important! If you suspect mechanical damage or defects, you should immediately contact specialists or exchange the hard drive under warranty.

Recovering bad HDD sectors using Victoria

If the appearance of broken segments is associated with software failures, then they can be restored using specialized software. One such program for recovering bad hdd sectors is Victoria. The utility is available in two versions - for Windows and DOS. Recovery via DOS will be the most effective, since when the OS is running, some sectors may be occupied and therefore unavailable for scanning.

To get started, we will need to do a little preparation. First, you will need a disk with a program image recorded on it or a bootable flash drive. If everyone can cope with recording an image, then creating a flash drive may be difficult.

Let's take a closer look at this step:


Note! The program takes up very little space, so after installing it, the drive can be used to store other information. To avoid accidentally deleting files necessary for the utility to work, it is recommended to select a separate folder for them.

Let's start the scanning process:


Here we need a point "Reallocated sector count", which displays the number of fragments located in the reserve zone, as well as "Current pending sectors", where parts that cannot be read are displayed. If their number is not very high, then the disk can be restored.

Hard drive recovery

Let's figure out exactly how this process happens. Problem segments can be roughly divided into two types. The first ones are not readable due to a mismatch between the information stored in them and its checksums.

This error occurs during a power outage, when new data has already been written, but the checksums remain old.

They simply cease to be recognized and are restored quite easily - by formatting them and recording the correct amounts.

The second type occurs as a result of mechanical damage. In this case, recovery is more difficult, but still possible. Restoring the functionality of such parts is carried out through the use of reserve areas that are on each hard drive.

We begin to recover each of these types of errors.

Video: HDD - “healing” bad sectors

  • First, let's try to fix bad sectors by erasing the information stored in them:
  • press F4 and get to the verification menu;

in the menu for selecting operations with unreadable sectors, indicate “BB: Erase 256 sect” and press “Enter”.

A long process of scanning and repairing bad sectors of the HDD will begin. If the program finds a bad sector, it will try to erase it, thereby correcting the error. If there is a mechanical defect, an error will be reported. In any case, you must wait until the check is completed and then separately correct the sectors with physical defects.


For this:

Important! If there are a lot of such sectors, then the reserve space may run out. A special message will inform you about this, and further restoration will become impossible.

After successfully recovering bad sectors on your hard drive, it is recommended to conduct a full check of the file system for errors.

This can be done using the CHKDSK utility or in the following way:


Photo: checking the disk for errors

Attention! To ensure that the system not only finds, but also corrects problems, before starting the scan, select “Automatically fix system errors.”

The methods described above will help you easily deal with non-critical cases of problem sectors, find and fix them.

By following our instructions exactly, any user can do this on their own, even without computer education. We hope that this information was useful to you.

Hello admin! Tell me how to trim the area with bad sectors on a hard drive?

My hard drive is terribly slow, reinstalling the operating system did not solve anything. Following your advice, I checked the hard drive with the Victoria program and it found a lot of sectors with an unsatisfactory read latency of 600 ms (candidates for bad blocks) - 153, and full-fledged bad blocks (bad sectors) -11 were also found. The parameter - Reallocated Sector Count - (remap), indicating the number of bad sectors reassigned using spare sectors from backup tracks - lights up red, as I understand it, there is nothing to reassign bad sectors with.

I read on the Internet that it is somehow possible to disable a section of a hard drive with bad sectors. How can this be done?

Hello friends! You can trim a section of a hard drive with bad sectors anywhere on the drive: at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, the most important thing is that the bad sectors are not scattered throughout the hard drive, in which case it is better to simply replace the problematic HDD. But often bad blocks are not scattered throughout the drive, but are grouped in one place, then you just need to take the Acronis Disk Director program or the free AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition and create unallocated space in place of the bad blocks, details later in the article.

We take our old friend - the WD5000AAKS hard drive (500 GB capacity). After our treatment, it worked for a year and the owner of the HDD again complained about its slow operation and asked once again to treat the disk.

First of all, we look at the SMART of the hard drive and see unsatisfactory drive status. Attribute Reallocated Sector Count, indicating the number of bad sectors reassigned - lights up red, which means the spare sectors on the backup tracks have run out and there is nothing left to reassign bad sectors to.

We define location of bad sectors on the hard drive

Now you need to determine the location of bad blocks on your hard drive.

We run the hard drive surface test in the Victoria program and see that immediately after the sector block number in the addressing LBA - 752610900 sectors went to HDD with unsatisfactory read latency of 600 ms (candidates for bad blocks). I scanned the surface of this hard drive several times and already know what will happen, so I set the drive to start scanning immediately from block No. 750000000 (Start LBA).

It is from this block of sectors that bad blocks begin to appear.

Upon completion of scanning, sectors with an unsatisfactory read latency of 600 ms, there were more than two hundred, and there were 8 bad blocks.

  • Note: If you come across such a hard drive, first try using algorithms BB = Advanced REMAP, BB = Erase 256 sect and finally, if all else fails, write across the entire clearing using the Write (erase) algorithm, The bad blocks may well be logical and they will be corrected by the program; this is exactly what we managed to achieve in previous articles. If the state of the drive remains unchanged, then we will have nothing left as soon as cut off the area with bad sectors on the hard drive. How to do it.

So, we can clearly see that on my drive the bad blocks appeared immediately aftersector block numbers in addressing LBA - 752610900 or look a little lower at the counter of ordinary megabytes (MB), it shows the figure 367485 MB (367 GB),

That is, I need to cut off the rest of the hard disk space to the end from this point (turn it into unallocated space). Since our drive has a capacity of 500 GB, or rather 465 GB, it means that we will cut off the space from the end of the hard drive from 465-367 = 98 GB, or it’s easier to cut it off with a margin of 100 GB

It is advisable to trim hard disk space with bad sectors on a HDD that does not contain partitions or any information, although the Acronis Disk Director and AOMEI Partition programs can do this with a disk containing data, but this will take a terribly long time, because the programs will move files located on bad sectors sectors, and when accessing this data everything will freeze.

AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition

Before starting work, copy all data from the drive (if possible).

In the main program window, we delete the partition along with the data from our hard drive.

Select the drive (D:) with the left mouse and click on the button Deleting a partition(by the way, you can delete a partition directly in Disk Management).

Quickly delete a partition.

Click on the Apply button.

Go. In some cases, the program may ask to reboot. Next will begin partition deletion process.

Unallocated space is formed in place of the disk (D:), select it with the left mouse and click on the button Creating a section.

Click on the button Advanced.

Choose Primary section. We move the delimiter to the left, but not all the way,

When creating disk D: we leave an unallocated area of ​​100 GB, it is in this area that the bad sectors are located.

Apply.

Go.

The disk creation process (D:) begins.

The result of our actions. We have created a partition on your hard drive where you can store data or even install an operating system on it. At the end of the partition there is unallocated space where bad sectors (bad blocks) are located.

For those who are not very familiar with a computer and do not know what DOS is, it is better not to repeat everything that will be described in this article, since here we will talk about how to restore damaged HDD sectors.

And so you discovered that you constantly have a disk check when loading, or your hard drive has started to slow down a lot. You scanned with some utility in read mode or some program from this article. Thus, you are convinced that you have slow sectors that respond longer than 500 ms, or BAD sectors, then this article is for you.

How to fix bad sectors

If your disk periodically disappears or is not visible at all, then this is most likely a problem with the controller, cable (cable) or power supply, but we will talk about BED sectors and very slowly readable cells, in general about software errors of the hard drive .

So you have discovered (HDD checking program) that you have slow sectors on your hard drive (usually red or brown). The decision to apply low-level formatting (Erase), we do it with a program MHDD and just forget about programs running under Windows, they won’t help you like HDDscan And Victoria.

Attention!!! All of the operations described below can lead to partial or complete deletion of information on your hard drive (HDD).

So, we boot from the boot disk where there is this MHDD program, these are the STEA Live, Hiren boot cd collections, or you can make a boot disk or flash drive yourself.

Stage 1. Getting rid of slow (red) sectors

Launch MHDD, type the command erase, the list of all commands can be viewed using the F1 command, the program will ask you to specify the scanning range, do not change anything, press Enter by default, wait. If there are red sectors left, you will have to run the command Erase waits

Stage 2. Getting rid of BAD sectors

We launch MHDD, type the Remap command, and the program will automatically scan the hard drive and replace bad sectors with backup ones. I do not recommend running this program if there are a large number of red and bad sectors in the hard drive partitions.

You can also clean the HDD of bad sectors manually, not the entire hard drive, but partially by address range.

Execute the command SCAN, as soon as the BAD sector appears, remember its number, stop the ESC process, run the command Erase and indicate the range in this case, if there is one bad sector, then its number and the next one, that is, we add one, then we run the command again Scan and look at the appearance of new bad sectors and repeat the procedure.

The video shows this whole process well:

If scanning takes a lot of time for you, then no program will help you. And you will have to buy a new hard drive.

P.S.: I am attaching a link to a video showing the operation of the MHDD program for general information.



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18 comments for the entry How to restore damaged bad (BAD) HDD sectors

    Well, you're giving a hint. I booted from MHDD and wrote how you set Erase in the first point and all Windows was erased. Even restoring through the archive didn’t help. Right now I’m installing a new Windows one.

    • Dear yura200, if you read the article carefully, it says that Erase- this is low-level formatting, well, I hope the word formatting, do you understand what it does?)

    So why write the first paragraph, write erase, it’s good that after installing Windows I was able to roll back everything right now. The most interesting thing is that I wanted to start this business with drive D and there were pictures of family videos, I would have grabbed it in grief, but it’s good that MHDD did not see drive D and only C drive was formatted. I'm pushing here so that others don't wipe out the whole screw. And where in the text do you say that Erase is formatting? When I used Mhdd I used erase when erasing bad blocks. Correct the text.

    • yura200, I am very sorry that you experienced such difficulties, but everything you do is your personal desire. The third paragraph in the text:

      So you have discovered (HDD checking program) that you have slow sectors on your hard drive (usually red or brown). The decision to apply low-level formatting (Erase)

      P.S.: And just for fun, you can look at the translation, it also says a lot erase- erase, cross out (from memory).

    Good afternoon.

    Can you tell me how to get the program to work on a laptop? Neither MHDD nor Victoria can see my hard drive.

    • Danila, Are you sure that you have an HDD in your laptop? and not an SSD, because the MHDD and Victoria programs do not work with second disks.

    Dear! If you see orange or red, or even an X in a square on your disk during the test, then don’t torture it, it’s finished. They are just trying to somehow support people during a stroke, and then you see what they become later, but the glands, after you have sent photos, are the only way to a well-deserved rest. And don't listen or read nonsense about restoration.

    That’s right, on the ASUS X552EA laptop the MHDD program does not see a 500 GB WD HDD (not an SSD, and not a hybrid, regular one).

    I played with the BIOS - this way and that... alas, the MHDD program opens from the bootable flash drive, but does not see the disk, no matter how hard I try.

    It is necessary to set the HDD operating mode to SATA Standard IDE INSTEAD OF SATA AHCI

    I want to check and fix this problem in dos (I checked it in winows with Victoria before) But I can’t switch from AHCI to IDE in the BIOS, there’s nothing similar. HP laptop (they wrote that they removed this function) How can you help?

    Place this hard drive in the system unit and launch it there and, if necessary, configure the BIOS.

    Respect and respect to the author! The user does not have the funds for a new hard drive, but a system engineer is vital... so I found, along the above path, that in addition to the first 42 gigs of crosses, there are two more thirds of the workspace... and the person is grateful!

    Thank you very much for the article!

    It was necessary to restore the functionality of the old disk. I scanned its state with the MHDD program (found on an old CD resuscitator), found several dozen “red” sectors, but did not know that the ERASE command was exactly what I needed. I thought it was a simple erasure of information.

    Now, after processing the disk with ERASE, I scanned it again. The result is not a single BED!

    The question is, if there are problems in the first 4 gigs and the last 4 gigs, and there are 2047 of them, is there any point in straining to recover?

    • Andrey, unless you need to pull the remaining data from the hard drive, but I would not use such a drive in the future.

    Is 653 bads really bad? Erase won't help?

    • Max yeah that's really bad

    Hello bortvlad. Is it worth bothering with treating bad diseases? Windows already monitors and edits cells as best it can. And he won’t write down the information in the bads. The loss of speed is negligible. And replacing cells from the backup area changes the desired table, which, in my opinion, will only accelerate the death of the HDD. If you really want low-level formatting and use the disk for archiving movies, games... What can you say about this software: Low Level Format Tool?

We will tell you one simple and second, more advanced way to check the health of your hard drive and fix bad sectors using the HDDScan program and the HDD Regenerator program.

The hard drive has its own resource, so it is advisable to check its condition once a year.

How to check your hard drive for errors

Previously, we wrote how to check a hard drive for bad sectors using the program. If the program shows problems with the hard drive, we will try to fix them.

What are bad blocks

In a nutshell, bad blocks ( bad block) are damaged sectors on the hard drive into which information cannot be written or read. They appear over time during the operation of the hard drive or when the hard drive is hit while it is running.

How to remove bad blocks from a hard drive

First way, for advanced users who recover bad sectors using the HDD Regenerator program, read

Second way, for Dummies. We recommend replacing it if bad sectors appear on your hard drive. If this is not possible, we will try to slightly extend the life of your disk.

For this we need the HDDScan program. You can download it

During the scan, HDDScan will address the bad sectors of the disk and the disk itself will mark them so that the Windows system will no longer write its data there. This method doesn't offer much of a guarantee, but it is easy to use.

After downloading and unpacking, go to the folder with the program and launch it by clicking on the HDDScan file.

We see a window in which we must select the drive to be checked in Select Drive. Then click on the round button and select Surface Test from the drop-down menu( surface test).

In the window that appears, select Verify and click the Add Test button. The hard drive test has started.

In order to see the progress of the test and the result, double-click on your hard drive in the Test Manager window and select the Map tab in the window that appears.

The window shows the process of checking the hard drive, where we are interested in the Bads parameter. If after the entire check the number of Bads is not very large, 2-5 bad sectors, then your hard drive will still work for some time.

If the quantity is measured in hundreds or thousands, the disk is severely damaged and may fail at any minute.

If there are bad sectors, you need to check the disk once a week and see if the number of Bads is increasing.