Best Software To Repair Bad Sectors In Hard Disk

[Rolando Kumar]

Yoursystem can continue to use the drive by marking that sector as unusable, but if you have enough bad sectors, or a SMART tool triggers a warning level, you might consider a drive replacement, as bad sectors can be a sign that more sectors, or the whole drive, might fail soon.

While there may be ways to force the drive to un-mark a sector as bad, allowing you to use it again, this is likely not a good idea. The sector may stay good, but it will just as likely become bad again. Some data may be lost or corrupted depending on how it fails.

Now, as for the error message you've pasted in your question (as of my writing this), that error has nothing to do with bad sectors. It means that you don't have access to the drive. Being sudo can give you access, so:

However, this is still probably not what you want, because /dev/sdb refers to the entire drive, whereas fsck is designed to work on filesystems, which are usually (but not always, and you may have an exception here) placed in partitions. If the above didn't work, you may instead have wanted to do this to the 1st partition on that drive:

In the olden days you used to have to take a note of the badblocks that were written on the drive and enter those in the defect list before formatting the drive, because hard disk surfaces were never "perfect", manufacturer's got wise to this because people buying disks would look at the defect table printed on the disk and buy the ones with the least amount of defects...

Now scroll forward 20 or so years and hard disk manufacturers hide the fact a brand new disk has bad blocks with the firmware, when you buy a brand new disk it will have in all probability bad blocks already, the firmware will detect newly grown badblocks and maps them out from a set of spare cylinders it has, but this only happens when a write operation occurs on that sector and the ECC algorithm detects bit failure, only then will it map the block out. So getting back to the point you can force a drive to map out the badblocks by simply using DD, ie/ [edit: following example was edited to prevent accidental drive destruction: removed wildcard character, replaced with X].

obviously alter the of=target to reflect the drive you want to zerothis is the quickest way to re-map a drives defects, its also the quickest way to totally trash your Linux setup by getting the target drive wrong, so check, double check then check again, before you press the enter key. You can increase the size of the blocksize in the dd command to optimize read/writes and perhaps make things go quicker, but there are diminishing returns after a point. I find anything between 1M and 8M works best for me

You can get DD to just write one sector, the bad one... to get it remapped, so you don't have to backup your drive, but that's a whole different kettle of fish and Russian roulette if you don't know exactly what you're doing .....

It is perfectly ok for a disk to have bad sectors as long as they aren't on the boot sector, if they are then the drive is useless, if you notice a few months later that your drive has developed more bad sectors then it's time to start shopping for a replacement.

You probably do not want to run badblocks as a standalone but with e2fsck.To run e2fsck with badblocks add the -c option."This option causes e2fsck to use badblocks program to do a read-only scan of the device in order to find any bad blocks. If any bad blocks are found, they are added to the bad block inode to prevent them from being allocated to a file or directory."

According to the latest annual survey of hard drive reliability by Backblaze, a provider of cloud backup services, the annualized failure rate for modern hard drives is around 2 percent. This means that if we have a group of 50 people, with every person in the group using two hard drives (perhaps one inside a personal computer and one inside a laptop), then one of those 50 individuals is going to lose all the data stored on the hard drives within a year.

As with so many other things in life, preparation is the key to success even when it comes to hard drive repair and recovery. If you know why hard drives fail and are familiar with some of the most popular hard drive repair and recovery solutions, you have much better chances of seeing your files again.

Now that you know what causes hard drive failure, we have for you a list of top 10 best HDD repair software tools that you can use to analyze, avoid, and solve virtually all common hard drive issues.

Disk Drill is a powerful and user-friendly hard drive recovery tool that handles many data loss scenarios, from accidentally deleted files to lost partitions, corrupted drives, and even unbootable hard drives.

Clonezilla is one of the most useful free hard drive repair software tools. It allows you to easily create full partition and disk backups, which can be deployed on other computers. Clonezilla supports far more file systems than most IT professionals can name, and it even features some basic boot repair tools.

GParted is a free, graphical partition editor that you can use to resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss or file corruption. You may want to shrink a partition to create space for another operating system or a backup partition. GParted is part of many other hard disk tools, such as Clonezilla or Partclone. It can also be downloaded from the official website as a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86 based computers and used from a USB flash drive.

While Windows comes with a built-in hard disk repair tool capable of fixing bad sectors and file access issues caused by them, it pales in comparison with HDD Regenerator. This special-purpose hard drive repair tool has the ability to detect physical bad sectors on a hard disk drive surface and repair them a recovery technology called Hysteresis loops generator. Originally developed by Dmitriy Primochenko, Hysteresis can make unreadable data readable again, and HDD Regenerator makes it easy to apply it on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10.

Many strains of malware, such as ransomware, can prevent you from accessing important files or even being able to boot up your computer at all. The good news is that Windows comes with a capable antivirus, called Windows Defender, and it takes just a few simple steps to instruct it to scan your entire computer:

Sometimes, hard disk issues are caused by faulty drivers and firmware. For example, a bug in the firmware of some SAS SSDs (Serial-Attached SCSI solid-state drives) produced by Hewlett Packard can cause the hard drives to fail after reaching 40,000 hours of operation (roughly 4 years).

If you want to format your system drive, then we recommend begin the installation of the Windows operating system and choose the Custom install option. You will then be able to format or delete any partition.

If none of the above-described fixes have solved your problems, then you should rule out the possibility that some other component, such as your motherboard is to blame for them. You can easily do that by disconnecting your hard disk and connecting it to a different computer.

Hard disks are mechanical devices, and, like all mechanical devices, they can fail without notice. Some hard disk failures are entirely avoidable, but many others are governed only by luck and chance.

FAQCan hard drives be repaired? Yes, hard drives are repairable. But keep in mind that it is not recommended to try to fix a hard dry by yourself since it is very easy to make things worse. If you want to repair a hard drive, the best option for you is to resort to a professional service.

The price for repairing a hard drive depends on the hard drive type, how severe the damage is, and, of course, on the repair service you choose. In general, the cost starts somewhere around $200 and can even go up to $1000 or more.

My SATA HDD (Hitachi DeskStar 7K160) seems to have 1 bad sector. Is it possible to try to fix it? I checked Hitachi's drive tools and all of them are diagnostic tools, so I don't know how much help they will be.

If it is formatted as NTFS you can try using chkdsk /r to repair the drive, but I'm not sure how much that will help you in the long run. If the drive is failing, this could be an early warning sign. Backup everything you want. I suggest using dd to avoid having to manually copy everything over.

Presuming you haven't yet lost any data, buy the new disk and clone across to it. Then you don't have to deal with setup again. You can connect the new disk and use dd from Ubuntu to clone it. There are multiple sites covering the process. As for recovering the sector, there are programs that claim they can, and some people claim to have good luck with them, I personally did not.

Your report is indicating you have one bad sector. This is not an emergency situation. Occasionally a disk can develope a bad sector for all sorts of reasons, and this is why disks come with a spare pool that automatically remaps the bad sector. This is what has happened with your disk.

Unfortunately the data on that sector is lost. To put this in perspective, depending on the sector size, in all liklihood you're talking about 4k of data, which could easily be some temp file that was created.

There are tools like spinrite that can sometimes retrieve data from drives that are failing by trying to read the sector repeatedly, but for one sector it's not worth the trouble unless you were to determine this was a vital data file.

The important thing is that you have backups of all of your important data files, and that you keep an eye on the drive. If you start to get additional problem sectors, then you should consider the advice provided by the other respondents, about getting a replacement.

Generally bad sectors are signs of physical damage to the drive and are unfixable, some file systems will allow you work round them but mostly they cannot be repaired. Sometimes the damage is localised but often they are indicators of more trouble to come, so if you plan to continue to use the drive take frequent backups.

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