Hard Drive -Bad Sectors

Why Hard Drives Get Bad Sectors?

A bad sector on a hard drive is simply a tiny cluster of storage space — a  sector — of the hard drive that appears to be defective. The sector won’t respond to read or write requests.

Bad sectors can occur on both traditional magnetic hard drives and modern solid-state drives. There are two types of bad sectors — one resulting from physical damage that can’t be repaired, and one resulting from software errors that can be fixed.

Types of Bad Sectors

There are two types of bad sectors — often divided into “physical” and “logical” bad sectors or “hard” and “soft” bad sectors.

1.    A physical bad sector is a cluster of storage on the hard drive that’s physically damaged.

2.    A logical bad sector is a cluster of storage on the hard drive that appears to not be working properly. Soft bad sectors are caused by software issues. Viruses and other malware that messes with your computer could also cause such system issues and cause soft bad sectors to develop

How to Check for and Repair Bad Sectors

Windows has a built-in Disk Check tool — also known as chkdsk

Other operating systems, including Linux and OS X, also have their own built-in disk utilities for detecting bad sectors. Bad sectors are just a reality of hard disks, and there’s generally no reason to panic when you encounter one. However, you should always have backups of your important files just in case a freak bad sector strikes — and rapidly developing bad sectors can certainly suggest oncoming hard drive failure.

Close all of your open programs and files. Windows 7 can't scan or fix a bad sector if that sector is being used by an open program or file