Repair damaged sectors on a hard drive?

Infopackets Reader Melissa P. writes:

" Dear Dennis,

Is there an easy way to fix and repair damaged sectors on a hard drive? Windows keeps reporting to me that my hard drive may have damaged sectors. "

My response:

A damaged sector *may* be an earlier warning sign that your hard drive is about to fail. If you have 1 damaged sector, it may not be all that bad. If you have many damaged sectors, that's a different story.

Here's the skinny --

Inside your hard drive are typically 2 ~ 4 discs (called "platters") stacked on top of one another, and read / write heads between each platter which collects or writes information to the drive. Because a hard drive platter sits *extremely* close to the read / write head of the drive, a single particle of smoke traveling between the two could cause the head to crash. That being said, bad sectors on the drive may be a result of corrupt medium (perhaps as a result of a warped or chipped platter, for example).

The disk repair utility in Windows XP, called ChkDsk ("check disk"), has an option to "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors". However, what may end up happening is that ChkDsk will mark the sector as bad (instead of attempting to recover any information) and your hard drive will no longer 'hover' over top of that area of the drive, making it impossible to recover any data on the sector.

What you should do is:

1. Attempt to backup all critical files on the drive (such as your documents, favorites, pictures, and anything else you can't download off the Internet or replace elsewhere).
    
2. Following that, run ChkDsk and attempt to recover bad sectors. To do this, go to My Computer, right click your hard drive (C Drive?), select Properties, then goto the Tools options menu, and select "Error-Checking". A new window will appear. Select the option "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors".

This test will take a while to complete.

If ChkDsk reports a lot of bad sectors, visit the hard drive manufacturer's web site, download a drive integrity tool, and test your drive. To find out the manufacturer of your drive, right click My Computer, go to Properties, go to Hardware, then Device Manager, navigate to Disk Drives, and collapse the menu. Your drive should be listed there. If not, open up your computer and have a look.

If the integrity tool reports many errors on the drive, you will need to ship it to the manufacturer for replacement (information for this procedure will be on the manufacturer's web site).