Repair Hard Drive's Bad Sectors

1. What is a bad sector?
   A bad sector is a part of a hard drive that you can't use because it has some errors.
2. Causes of bad sectors:
   a. A sudden shock to the hard drive:
   - Be careful when you install your hard drive.
   - Fix your hard drive well and in a suitable position.
   - If you have to move your hard drive to another computer, place it in a box with spongy,
   soft material inside, and hard material outside.
   - Avoid any vibrations to your hard drive.
   b. Bad power supply system:
   - Use a power stabilizer.
   - Avoid sudden power off.
   c. Errors in the hard drive's media:
   - Very uncommon. Use a hard drive from a reliable manufactures.
3. How do you know that the hard drive has bad sectors?
   a. During copying and creating new files, the system will hang and a blue screen will
   appear with an error message "Error Writing to Disk C:"
   b. Hearing strange voices from the hard drive may be happen.
   c. At startup the following message will keep coming out "One or more of your drives may
   have developed bad sector".
   d. When opening a file the following message keep coming out "Error Reading from drive
   C".
4. Repairing bad sectors:
   a. If you can't login windows desktop:
   There are two methods to manage bad sectors, the first method is trying to repair
   without formatting, the other one is performing low level format. Always try the first
   method first then when it fails, use the second one.
   - Using Norton Disk Doctor (NDD) :
   . Download NDD.
   . Unzip NDD file and copy it to CD.
   . Use windows startup disk to boot your system with CD support.
   . Change drive letter to CD drive command prompt letter.
   . At CD drive command prompt type "ndd.exe". . From the main screen, choose diagnose disk. . From select drive to diagnose screen, select
   your drive using space bar. . Press enter to start diagnose. The NDD will scan all clusters and mark the bad one as
   unavailable cluster.
   - Using Seagate Disk Manager:
   . Download Seagate Disk Manager
   . Put a formatted floppy disk in floppy disk drive.
   . Run the downloaded application. It'll create a bootable floppy disk manager.
   . Boot your computer from the bootable floppy disk manager created in the previous
   step.
   . From the disk manager main menu choose advanced options.
   . From advanced options menu select maintenance options.
   . From maintenance options menu select utilities.
   . Select the disk that has bad sectors.
   . Select zero fill drive. This will set the hard drive to the factory setting.
   . Note that: all partitions and data will be deleted. You may partition the hard drive
   using FDisk utility for DOS, or partition magic program for windows. Download
   the last version of FDisk here
   b. If you can login windows desktop:
   - Using windows scandisk utility:
   . Right click the drive icon and choose properties.
   . From properties window, choose Tools.
   . From error-checking frame press Scan Now… button.
   . From scan window check scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.
   - Other utility programs:
   . You may use other utility programs to scan and repair the bad sectors (such as Norton
   utilities, Fix it utilities,….etc).