A computer hard drive (or a hard disk or HDD) is a type of technology that uses your computer to store operating systems, applications, and data files such as documents, pictures, and music.
A hard disk drive (HDD) consists of a platter with compartments for storing data. This data is your operating system, applications, and files you create. There is an actuator arm that moves across the dish to read or write information. To speed up the process, the actuator arm moves across the plate as it rotates.
The platter and actuator arm are delicate, so they are covered by a steel case. This prevents disk damage under normal circumstances. The platters are divided into circular strips, each with a different radius called a track. When you have a track of the same radius as the other on a different platter, it creates a magnetic cylinder. Each plate is divided into several sectors based on a certain pressure. The smallest data storage unit is called a sector.
Bad sectors: Bad sectors refer to disk areas where data cannot be properly accessed due to logical or physical errors. If a track has a bad sector, it is called a “bad sector on disk”. There are two types of bad sectors. Logically bad sectors are caused by software errors that can be corrected and physically bad sectors are caused by physical damage and cannot be repaired.
Before repairing bad sector solutions, you must first identify the bad sectors as unusable on the hard drive. However, if you do not know that your hard disk has bad sectors, then you need to check the hard disk first and then identify the bad sectors.
So, check the disk and identify the bad sectors step by step.
- Type cmd in the Windows search box and right-click the command prompt to select Run as administrator.
- In the popa command line window, type the command chkdask c:/f/ra and hit Enter to continue.
- You will receive a message telling you that Chkdsk cannot be run because the volume is being used by another process. Now type Y to continue. During the restart process, the check disk process will be performed.
- When the check disk process is complete, bad sectors will be identified on the HDD.
Hard drives can cause bad sector data loss or other bad issues. Therefore, after you identify the bad blocks as unusable, you have a better backup of files to avoid data loss. For this, you can use professional recovery tools.
