What is Bad Sectors? and How can we fix Them?
Bad Sectors:
To make it easy for all of to understand what a bad sector is I will try to explain it away from the technical terms. Consider you have a piece of paper and the entire paper is the writable zone where your hard disk saves information. On this piece of paper we draw lines to divide it in small squares. One small square represents a sector of your hard disk, and if we divide one square in to 4 squares we can obtain, imaginary of course, 4 cluster. Ok know you want to write a sentence on the paper. You will notice that there no room to write the sentence in only one small square and you will need a certain amount of squares from different portions of the paper; know write down your sentence.
After that take scissor and cut a word from the sentence in the middle of it. You as a person can still read the sentence because we can realize what word is creating problem from the sentence but a computer to show you that sentence needs all of the words to reproduce it for you. The part that you cut from the sentence is our Bad Block, and now you can understand how the hard disk functions. And all of you know that on the driver is more then a sentence written, and that it contains millions of letters and numbers and also holds information about all of the boards, along whit their drivers, that are in your personal computer.
Some surface errors have connections with the hardware equipment of the computer directly and can create physically bad sectors on the hard drive, and that means a cluster from the hard disk sector is unreadable. The writing action on the hard disk is possible thanks to a “writing head” that revolves at a distance of 0.3 microns over the writable layer of the disk. If one or more heads actually touch the writable disk the chance to destroy that cluster is almost 100%.
By definition, the bad sectors are a portion of writable part of hard disk that can not be read or write. So because of this definition the data that are on the bad sectors may be lost forever.
You can be easily come to know that your hard disk have bad sectors, most of the time are errors that appear because of the more often alerts from the partition or the Windows.
Bad sectors also known as simple as “bad” can appear to any hard disk after a time of function. In most of the cases the bad sectors that appear are not in a bigger quantity from your stocking space (about 0.01% for newer hard disk). For the new generation of hard disk there are some spare clusters just for these problems. When a bad sector appears the safety measure remove the information that it contains to a spear cluster and it avoids the lost of data or the corruption of the data.
In a generally idea a bad sector is a big problem for your hard disk and for your entire computer. There are some programs that can repair them if there are not physically and are from data corruption.
To fix Bad Sectors
Let’s try to explain the question that grinds us all when we talk about the hard disk. Can we actually repair a bad block? Before of the answer you must find some information about what is a hard disk, how does it work, what are bad blocks? After that you must identify them because you will need the exact location of the affected sectors. After you have done that you must follow few steps:
Before you try to resolve the problem with the bad sector you must extract the data that was written to that block. To do this you must run a Recovery program that you can find freeware on the net.
Bad sectors are unreadable parts on your hard disk but the nature of them must not be always physically and that part of the platens to be destroyed. Let’s suppose that you have a 20 gigabits partition on your hard disk that has bad sectors. After the identification program it will indicate you where are the blocks situated on the partition. So this way you can allocate them in to another partition that you must never use again. Another scenario can be created and the bad sectors can be at the beginning of the partition in the middle of it and at the end of the partition. I know it’s a little bit tricky because you can’t just go on and create three new partitions to eliminate the bad sectors from use. In this case most of the new hard disk has a spare space available just for this type of scenarios. You must access the CASH memory of the hard disk and indicates to the hard disk that instead of writing down on the effected blocks it must write to the spare blocks, in other words hide the bad blocks.
Another way to restore the hard disk is to use the low level format option. Many of you may think that low level format is a program. Wrong! The low level format option is set for any BIOS and can be easily use if you know some command line programming, like Disk Operating System (DOS). The low level format can take to be complete a very long period of time but in the most cases we can obtain marvelous results. Actually the low level option takes every cluster of the hard disk and identifies them again and writes down on the memory of the hard disk what sectors can be written and witch blocks are un-writable. This procedure is the best that can be because it will need no effort from your side to try and avoid the bad blocks that already exists and the hard disk itself know where the bad blocks are.
In conclusion the bad blocks can’t be fixed. The problem is a permanent and we can only try to use the hard disk until it is dead for good. But if you are having financial problem this is a best way to keep going with your old hard disk. Some programs like Flobo HDD repair and HDD Regenerator are well-known in regard to hide the bad sectors.
Note: I apologize for spellings and grammatical mistakes in this article.
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mehmood1984 said:
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