Bad Sectors

Bad sectors are areas on the disk that have physical damage. No data can be written to the physical damage otherwise an data that was written there will be lost. There is a program that is built-in to Windows, called ScanDisk, that will scan the scan for you and search for bad sectors so that it can mark those areas as bad and no data will be written there. To run ScanDisk on Windows XP or 2000, just click Start > My Computer for XP users, or double click My Computer on the desktop for 2000 users. Once the window comes up, locate your OS drive which is usually lettered as (C:) and right-click on it. Click Properties and click on the Tools tab. Click on the Check Now button and make sure both checkboxes are checked in and click Start. It will ask you if you want to schedule a reboot and you should yes. Restart the computer and let the ScanDisk program scan the entire drive and watch for it to say “xx KB in Bad Sectors” If that number is 0, then you have no bad sectors on your drive.

For Vista users, the best way to force Vista to scan a disk is to go to Start > All Programs > Accessories. Right-click on Command Prompt and click on Run as Administrator. When the window comes up, type in ‘chkdsk /R’ without the quotes press enter. It will say that it can’t check the disk while Windows is running and ask to schedule on next reboot. Type Y and press enter. Reboot Vista and let it scan the disk. Make sure you watch for the bad sectors part.

If you did have bad sectors, the ScanDisk program will attempt to recover any data that it finds, but chances of recovering all the data is rare. This is why it’s important to back-up your files since harddrives will fail in the future and there are some ways to tell when a harddrive can fail, but most of the time they fail without notice. A general tip to follow is the older your harddrive, the greater the chances it will fail.