Programs for removing bad sectors on a hard drive. How to trim an area with bad sectors on a hard drive

Read about the reasons for the appearance of bad sectors on a hard drive, how to detect and fix them. How to recover data that is damaged or lost due to bad sectors. A bad sector of a hard drive is a tiny piece of disk space that fails during operation. This sector does not respond to read or write requests.

Bad sectors can occur on both traditional magnetic hard drives and modern solid-state SSD drives. There are two types of bad sectors - some are the result of physical damage to the disk and cannot be fixed, others are the result of software errors and can be corrected.

Types of bad sectors

There are two types of bad sectors. They are often called "physical" or "brain teaser" broken sectors.

Physical bad sectors are hard drive space that is physically damaged. The hard drive head may have come into contact with the moving plate and damaged it, or moisture or dust may have gotten into the drive and clogged it. In the case of SSD drives, bad sectors can occur as a result of wear or overheating of microcircuits or moisture. This type of bad sectors cannot be fixed.

Logical bad sectors are hard drive space that is not working properly. The operating system, trying to read data from such a bad sector, receives an adjustment error code that does not match the contents of the sector. This means something went wrong. Such sectors are marked as damaged and Windows no longer uses them to store information. However, such areas can be restored by overwriting the disk with zeros (the so-called low-level formatting). Windows' built-in Check Disk utility can also fix bad sectors.

Reasons for the appearance of physical bad sectors

Your hard drive may have bad sectors straight from the factory, especially for cheap Chinese-made models. Modern equipment manufacturers are not perfect, so there is an error in everything. This is why SSDs are often delivered with several bad blocks. Such blocks are marked as defective and the data is moved to additional memory cells on the SSD.

In solid-state drives, bad sectors appear naturally as a result of a large number of write attempts. The contents of such sectors are moved to additional SSD memory cells until the memory is exhausted. After this, as new failures appear, the storage capacity begins to decrease.

In traditional magnetic hard drives, bad sectors are often the result of physical damage. Hard drives may have manufacturing errors, moving parts of the drive are subject to normal wear and tear, the drive can be dropped causing the head to scratch the magnetic plates, air containing dust and moisture can get inside the drive and damage the drive.

Reasons for the appearance of software (logical) bad sectors

Logical bad sectors appear as a result of software errors. For example, if the power supply is turned off or the power cable is unplugged while writing to the computer's hard drive, writing data to the sector is interrupted in the middle of the operation. In most cases, this results in sectors with data that fails the data write test. Such sectors are marked as bad. Viruses and other malicious software can also cause system errors and bad sectors.

Data loss due to hard drive error

In reality, bad sectors lead to a frightening fact - even if your hard drive continues to work properly, your data can be seriously damaged, leading to the loss of important information. Whether it's work documents or family photos, all data stored on a computer is valuable to us. This is another reason why you should always back up your data. Only having several backup copies on different storage media can protect you from data loss as a result of bad sectors or other disk failures.

When the computer detects a bad sector, it ignores it in further work. The data that was in this sector will be moved, so the system will not read or write this sector. Modern hard drives support S.M.A.R.T technology. and keep records of the number of moved sectors. The accounting variable is called “Reallocated Sectors”; its value can be viewed in the free CrystalDiskInfo utility. It is possible that the contents of a bad sector cannot be read and moved. This will corrupt the file and you will no longer be able to open it.

Several bad sectors are not an indicator that the hard drive will soon fail. However, if the disk's bad sector counter regularly increases and the computer warns about this with a S.M.A.R.T. error. You should replace your drive as soon as possible.

How to check and fix bad sectors

Windows has a built-in Check Disk utility (also known as chkdsk). The program checks your hard drive for bad sectors, marking sectors with physical damage as bad, and corrects sectors with logical errors, making them available for further use.

If Windows believes that there is a problem on the hard drive related to bad sectors, the Chkdsk utility will be launched automatically when the system starts. But you can also run this utility manually at any time.

Other operating systems, including Linux and OS X, also have their own built-in disk utilities to detect bad sectors.

Bad sectors are a cruel reality of hard drives and there is no need to panic when you encounter them. However, you should always back up important files in case of a sudden increase in the number of bad sectors. It should be remembered that the presence of a large number of bad sectors signals the imminent failure of the hard drive.

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:

• squeaks, rattles, tapping when the disk is operating;
• heating the surface of the HDD (this should not happen under normal conditions);
• common 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.

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 USB 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 a mechanical defect is present, 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:

Now the recovery operation will work on a different principle, trying not to erase bad sectors, but to replace them with space from the reserve area.

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:

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.

The article contains a lot of information not only about the Victoria program, but also about the DMDE program, with which we will create a sector-by-sector image of a faulty hard drive; this also needs to be done correctly so that user data is not lost.

Hard drive test in Victoria and how to fix bad sectors (bad blocks).

Friends, if you are reading these lines, it means you have some kind of problem with your hard drive, and how to choose a hard drive was discussed earlier in the article.

When do we think that something wrong is happening with our hard drive?

1. It is impossible to copy the necessary information from a hard drive to another drive; when copying, the operating system freezes and only a reboot can save it.
2. Windows can freeze unexpectedly at any stage of operation.
3. It is impossible to reinstall the operating system, the installation process freezes while unpacking Windows files, or the installer reports the error “The installation cannot continue...”, or Windows takes a very long time to install, for example several hours.
4. When you turn on the computer, the Chkdsk utility immediately starts and checks the hard drive partitions for errors.
5. The hard drive makes strange sounds (clicking, squeaking) and is periodically not detected in the BIOS.
6. Download the Victoria program to work directly in the operating system Windows XP, 7, 8, 10
   Go to the official website of the program and select the version for Windows. I advise you to download the Victoria 4.3 beta version, since Victoria 4.46 beta does not always work correctly.

Victoria for working from a boot disk

We go to the official website of the program and select.

We also need Victoria on the boot disk, but we will consider working with this version second. If you do not have a disk drive, then we will make a bootable USB flash drive with the Victoria program.

So, let's go, firstly, in the Victoria program we will accurately determine the numbers of bad sectors (bad blocks), then we will make a sector-by-sector copy of the hard drive and thereby save the user data, and then we will hide the bad sectors of the bad blocks (remap) in the Victoria program. We will also learn how to do a “Record across the entire clearing” (Erase test), that is, when a bad sector is detected, rewrite the entire block (256 sectors) of the hard drive with zeros.

For example, let's take a real hard drive with bad sectors:

Friends, the minimum unit of information on a hard disk is a sector; the volume of user data is 512 bytes; if the information in a sector cannot be read, then the sector is unreadable or, in other words, faulty. All operating system freezes occur when reading information from such a sector.

This hard drive WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2 (500 GB capacity) is really faulty,

The operating system on it constantly freezes and periodically when loading it starts checking the hard drive for errors. The last straw for the owner of the hard drive was that it was impossible to copy important data to another disk, and even reinstalling the operating system ended with yet another hang on unpacking Windows files. Replacing the installation disk with the operating system did not yield anything, and the hang was repeated at another stage of the installation.

That’s when the question arose about what to do with this hard drive, because one of the partitions contained important data and needed to be copied.

Victoria launch:

Launch the Victoria program as administrator. We agree with all warnings about working on a 64-bit system.

Select the initial tab Standard. If we have several hard drives, in the right part of the window, select the desired hard drive with the left mouse, in our case WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2

and go to the SMART tab,

press the Get SMART button, the GOOD message will light up to the right of the button and S.M.A.R.T. will open. the hard drive we have selected.

S.M.A.R.T. This screw turned out to be not the best. Why? Read our first article in the series about the Victoria program. Here I will only say that as many as four attributes of S.M.A.R.T. glow red, including the most important parameter, attribute

5 Reallocated Sector Count - (remap), indicating the number of reassigned sectors, this means the spare sectors on the backup tracks are running out and soon there will be nothing to reassign bad sectors with.

Go to the Tests tab.

Hard drive surface test in Victoria program

On the right side of the program window, check the Ignor item and the read item, then click Start. A simple hard drive surface test will run without error correction. This test will not bring any good or bad effects on your hard drive, but when the test is finished, we will know what condition our hard drive is in.

The surface of the hard drive begins to be scanned and after a while bad sectors are detected. After 40 minutes, Victoria gives us the following result:

A lot of good sectors with a good read latency of no more than 5 ms - 3815267

There are also sectors with a bad read delay of 200 ms

There are no sectors with unsatisfactory read latency of more than 600 ms (candidates for bad blocks), but...

What’s really bad is that there are full-fledged bad sectors (bad blocks), the information from which could not be read at all - 13

13 bad sectors (bad blocks), they all start in the area 6630400 and end at 980000000, that is, scattered throughout the hard drive. Bad block numbers must be written down. Friends, it is quite possible that all our problems with the hard drive can be due to these 13 bads and we need to get rid of them, but first we will make a sector-by-sector image of the diseased screw.

The hard drive of the victim WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B2 (capacity 500 GB) was divided into two partitions: drive D: with the operating system, capacity 120 GB, and drive E: with data, capacity 345 GB.

Before working with the Victoria program, let’s protect ourselves and make a full image of the E drive partition: the volume is 345 GB and we will extract the data from the image. We will create the image in another DMDE program and place it on another physical disk SAMSUNG HD403LJ (400 GB capacity). I will show you how to do this.

Managing my computer's disks

Important data is located on the New Volume (E:) with a capacity of 347 GB of the WDC WD5000AAKS hard drive (total volume 500 GB), which means we will create an image of the partition (E:)

We will create a sector-by-sector image of the partition (E:) on a SAMSUNG HD403LJ hard drive (400 GB capacity), there is only one partition without data on it. New volume (F:)

The third physical disk in the system is an SSD solid state drive (120 GB capacity) drive (C:), it contains our running Windows 8.1 operating system, which is where we are now.

Creating a sector-by-sector image of the entire hard drive or the desired partition in the DMDE program

DMDE is also a very good tool for creating sector-by-sector copies of a faulty hard drive.

We go to the DMDE program website http://dmde.ru/download.html and download the program, click GUI for Windows.

DMDE is downloaded in an archive, unzip it and run the file dmde.exe.

Then select the language Russian.

We accept the terms of the License Agreement. In the initial window of the program, we need to select either a Physical device (that is, a full hard drive) or a partition with data to create an image.

We only need volume E:, so left-click on our WDC WD5000AAKS hard drive, then check Logical drives

and partition (E:), then click OK.

Menu. Create image/clone...

Place for recording, click Disk.

New volume F: and OK. It is necessary that the partition on which the sector-by-sector image of the faulty hard drive (or partition with unreadable data) will be created should be no smaller in volume than this disk.

On the new volume F: all data will be deleted, we agree Yes.

The creation of a sector-by-sector copy of the partition (E:) of the diseased hard drive WDC WD5000AAKS begins on a new volume (F:) of another healthy hard drive of the SAMSUNG HD403LJ drive, which continues for 6 hours (the image is removed from particularly “bad” screws for several days) and freezes completely at 83 percent, after waiting a couple of hours, I clicked the Abort button!

Friends, if we interrupt the creation of the image of a sector-by-sector division at the very end (after all, 83%), then two options await us, as Suvorov used to say - “either the chest in the crosses, or the head in the bushes.”

After interrupting the operation, we go to the New volume F: and see if there is any data on it and... they are there, the DMDE program managed to transfer everything we needed to the F: volume, almost all the data is read without errors. So our case is not complicated and

the bads are mostly software ones

But in some cases, not everything will be so rosy, and when we try to enter a partition with a sector-by-sector copy, we will be greeted with this error: No access to F:\ . The file or folder is damaged. Reading is impossible.

No access to F:\. The file system is not recognized. Make sure that all required system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not damaged.

But even in this case, we will not give up and will do so.

What to do if the creation of a sector-by-sector image fails

Friends, the process of creating a sector-by-sector copy does not always end successfully even after several hours, but if you stop creating a sector-by-sector copy, the data in it may become unreadable.

Or, in the process of creating a sector-by-sector copy, the following error will appear: “The request was not completed due to an input/output error on the device” (see screenshot below), indicating that DMDE was unable to read the information in the bad sector (the sector number is indicated in the error) in this case click

Repeat, there will be a second attempt to read information from this sector and it may end in success. If this error with the same sector appears again, then click

Ignore and the creation of a sector-by-sector image will continue, but we will lose information in this sector and, as a result, no file will open in the sector-by-sector copy. If the error "The request was not completed due to an I/O error on the device" appears too often, you can select

Ignore all and all such errors will be skipped, or you can press the button

Parameters and configure the DMDE program accordingly for such a severe case. Click the Options button in this window.

You need to be careful in the parameters, as you can configure a lot of things here. For example, force DMDE to create a sector-by-sector image from a hard drive not from the beginning, but from the end, for this you need to check the box

Reverse the move, sometimes it brings results.

And click Options again.

In this window, check the Don't wait if the device is not ready - Always checkbox. If you select this option, the operation will continue even

in case of an error related to the device not being ready. If you do not check this option, then on some “poor” hard drives a warning will be displayed with the expected user reaction, that is, the image will not be created automatically.

Number of auto retries on CRC error - 0

Number of auto retries if sector not found - 0

Fill bad sectors with hex

Then OK and OK, the creation of the sector-by-sector image begins.

Left click to enlarge image

This setting option also proved to be workable.

Ignore I/O errors - Always

Don't wait if device isn't ready - Always

Number of retries on CRC error - 0

In general, I advise you to study the manual for the DMDE program http://dmde.ru/manual.html or http://dmde.ru/docs/DMDE-manual-ru.pdf, you can also wait for our article on creating a sector-by-sector image of a faulty hard drive with various programs, in it we will even look at creating a bootable flash drive with the DMDE program.

• If DMDE does not help you, then you can try other programs, for example Acronis True Image. Of course, there are still ways in which you can make a sector-by-sector image of a faulty screw, for example, booting from some operating system based on Linux, for example Ubuntu, but I will not describe the process itself here and would rather write a separate article. You can also run the safecopy utility under Linux.
• What to do if you still cannot make a sector-by-sector copy of the hard drive is up to you to decide. You can contact a good and reputable data recovery service and specialists will take a sector-by-sector copy of your hard drive using special expensive equipment, for example using the same PC−3000 complex. If you don’t mind your data, then you can take a risk and run algorithms in the Victoria program that rid the surface of your hard drive of bad sectors (bad blocks), how to do this is written below, the hard drive can come back to life after this operation.
• Important: Kazansky (developer of the Victoria program) promises that the most innovative algorithm for hiding bad blocks BB = Advanced REMAP is NOT destructive for data, but in some cases it can be destructive for your files, since even the most advanced Victoria algorithm Advanced REMAP hides defects (remap), this is, in any case, a change in the translation of the screw, which means the loss of user data (details below. I want to say that sometimes it happened that a Victoria hard drive would cure bad problems and you would even be able to copy information from such a hard drive, but unfortunately not All information is readable.

So, in our case, we made a sector-by-sector copy of the diseased hard drive, namely the new volume E: the DMDE program was able to do it, although in some places DMDE froze a little, but everything ended successfully. The sector-by-sector copy of the new volume (E:) is an exact copy and is located on volume F: All existing data is successfully read and copied.

The main problem has been solved and user data has been saved, now we proceed to the hard drive treatment procedure.

How to get rid of bad sectors (bad blocks) using the Victoria program

Friends, let’s now imagine that we were unable to make a sector-by-sector image of a hard drive with bad blocks and we couldn’t come up with anything else and decided to rid our hard drive of bad blocks in the Victoria program, in the hope that after hiding the bad sectors we will be able to read and copy the information to your hard drive.

Note: it is difficult to rid a screw of bad blocks in a running Windows, especially if, for example, you have a laptop with one hard drive and an operating system is installed on the same hard drive and you want to cure the same operating system from bad blocks. In such cases, create a bootable USB flash drive with Victoria, boot the laptop from it and get rid of bad sectors. I propose to create a bootable USB flash drive in the next article, but now we will find out how this is done directly in a running operating system, I will show you everything.

Remap

In the main Victoria window, check the Remap item, which denotes the algorithm for reassigning bad blocks to sectors from backup tracks during the scanning process. Test in Read mode, that is, from beginning to end and click on the Start button.

While the scanning is underway, let's talk about this.

1. What happens with this Remap algorithm? An attempt is made (several times) to force information to be written to the bad sector of the hard drive; if the attempt is successful, then the sector becomes healthy and is removed from the list of bad blocks (remap does not occur). If the write attempt is unsuccessful, then the diseased sector is reassigned to a healthy sector from a hard drive backup track specially designed for such cases.

2. Remap is the reassignment (replacement) of a diseased sector, assigning its LBA number to another physically healthy sector from the reserve track. Information from the sector (at the time of reassignment) hangs in the screw's RAM, and as soon as the sector is reassigned, it is written back.

Remap is basically not destructive for information; if your data is lost, it will be only in one bad sector, but you must admit that the data in the bad block was already unreadable. In the second case, the data will simply be transferred to the sector from the backup track.

Result. As I said, it is difficult to fix anything in a running Windows and Victoria cannot perform a Remap. After 20 minutes, the same result, 13 bad blocks, and you and I will have to make a bootable flash drive with Victoria and work in DOS.

How to scan a specific area on your hard drive in Victoria

If you know the exact addresses of bad sectors, you can set the exact scanning parameters in the Victoria program. For example, we know that our bad blocks start from sector 770,000,000, then in the Start LBA: item, set this number here and the Victoria program will begin scanning and fixing the surface of the hard drive from sector 770,000,000, also, if you set what you need number in the End LBA item: then Victoria will finish scanning in the sector you need.

Erase algorithm

Friends, you can ask me, what will happen if we use the Erase test or is there also Write?

When Erase detects an unreadable sector, it forcibly rewrites the entire block of 256 sectors with zeros (be careful, in some cases your data on the hard drive will be deleted).

• Most often, you come across software (program) bads that are removed most quickly by resetting them - the Erase algorithm, and even if writing to the zero sector is unsuccessful, Remap may well occur, since the hard drive firmware may consider such a sector to be faulty. If Erase does not help, then you can choose Remap, but as we know, the chances that Remap will be performed in a running Windows are low.
• In some cases, software bads can be removed even by simple formatting using Windows itself.

I don’t want to experiment with our WDC WD5000AAKS hard drive, since in the next article I plan to cure it of bad blocks in DOS mode using a bootable flash drive with the Victoria program and still return to the owner the hard drive cured of bad blocks with intact data.

I'll just show you on another hard drive how to run this test in a running Windows.

In the main window of Victoria, select our hard drive and go to the Tests tab, check the Erase item (be careful, in some cases your data on the hard drive will be deleted) - if an unreadable sector is detected, it forcibly rewrites the entire block of 256 sectors with zeros, naturally the information is in the entire block sectors are completely lost, but if an overwrite occurs, the block returns to work (becomes healthy).

Test in Read mode

That is, from beginning to end and click Start.

Often, when “resetting” in a running Windows, the following errors will appear:

Block (bad sector number) try Erase 256 sectors. It was not possible to rewrite the block of sectors.

Write algorithm

The Write mode does not look for any bad sectors, but simply immediately erases all the information on the hard drive by filling all sectors with zeros, this is what repairmen say in the jargon of “Write across the entire clearing”, this algorithm is able to cure a hard drive from bads and simply bad sectors with great read delay, but after such a test it will be impossible to restore data on the hard drive, so first copy all important files to a portable 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 films.

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.

One of the biggest annoyances for PC owners can be damaged sectors on the hard drive. Such sectors are called “broken,” and the hard disk itself with such damage is said to have begun to “crumble.”

The location of such damage directly determines the ability to turn on/off the computer. If the sectors where the operating system files are located are damaged, the PC will not turn on. If we are talking about sectors where other files are located, then the user will have the opportunity to boot the machine. Depending on this feature, the method of removing the hard drive is selected.

What to do

With this type of damage, you need to open “My Computer” and right-click the desired drive. Next, from the proposed options, select “Properties”, then “Service” and “Run check”. You need to check the box “Automatically correct system errors” and “Scan and repair bad sectors”. By clicking “Start”, the user starts checking the hard drive for damage. After this, you are instructed to restart the PC.

In the second case, you should have a disk with a virtual operating system or a Windows installation disk at hand. To start the computer, you need to insert the disk into the drive and turn on the machine in normal mode. All further actions are similar to those described in the previous paragraph. When working with the installation disk, a menu will appear with the option to select the “Restore System” command. As a result, the hard drive will be checked for bad sectors, and any damage found will be repaired.

Special programs

You can also check and restore your hard drive using a program launched through the recovery console. The Recovery Console itself can be launched without a boot disk. To do this, press the F8 key and select Safe Mode, which supports the command line. After the console is loaded, the partition with Windows installed on it is selected. It is necessary to ensure that the partition matches the disk after this administrator. After the appropriate prompt appears in the line, enter the disk name, route and file name. Using the Enter key, the user starts the recovery process.

Thus, when checking the “C” partition of the hard drive, you need to launch the system recovery console and issue the command chkdsk c: /f /r. It’s easy to prevent such a nuisance in the future - for this you need to acquire special programs, for example, MHDD. Such