How Do I Repair A Corrupted Hard Disk Without Formatting?

Any Dennis

A computer hard drive (or a hard disk or HDD)is one kind of technology that stores the operating system, applications, and data files such as documents, pictures, and music that your computer uses.

A hard disk drive (HDD) is composed of a platter that contains compartments to hold data. This data is your operating system, applications, and files you have created. There is an actuator arm that moves across the platter to read or write the information. To make the process faster, the platter spins as the actuator arm moves across it.

The platter and the actuator arm are delicate, so they are covered by a steel case. It prevents damage to the disk under normal circumstances.

The platters are divided into circular strips, each with a different radius called tracks. When you have a track with the same radius as another one on a different platter, it creates magnetic cylinders. Each platter is divided into several sectors based on a certain arc. The smallest data storage unit is called the sector.

Now, let’s understand what are bad sectors?

Bad sectors refer to areas on the disk where data cannot be accessed appropriately due to logical or physical errors. If a track has bad sectors, this is called "bad sectors on disks". There are two types of bad sectors. Logical bad sectors are caused by software errors that can be fixed & physical bad sectors result from physical damage and can't be repaired.

Several reasons cause hard drive corruption & bad sector is one of them.

Before going to repair bad sector solutions, first, you need to mark the bad sectors as unusable on the hard drive. However, if you don’t know whether your hard disk has bad sectors, you need to check the hard disk first and then mark the bad sectors later.

So, check the disk and mark the bad sectors step by step.

1: Type the cmd in the search box of Windows and right-click the Command Prompt to choose Run as administrator.

2: In the popup command line window, type the command chkdsk c:/f /r and hit Enter to continue.

3: You will receive a message which tells you that Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Now type Y to continue. During the restarting process, the check disk process will be performed.

4: When the check disk process finishes, the bad sectors on HDD will be marked.

Bad sectors on the hard drive may lead to data loss or other worse problems. Therefore, after you have marked the bad blocks as unusable, you had better back up the files to avoid data loss. For this, you can use the professional recovery tool - Wondershare Recoverit.