Data Recovery - Bad Sectors

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Recovering data from hard disk drives containing bad sectors

Problems: Bad sectors are areas of the hard disk that become unreadable. All hard disk drives are will develop bad sectors eventually, normally sectors that go bad are flagged by the hard disk and not used any further, but if you have valuable data or files that reside on sectors that become bad sectors, you will not be able to access your data or files correctly.

Symptoms: The drive may appear to run slowly, specific files may take a long time to access or be completely inaccessible. In severe cases, the entire disk may become inaccessible.

Cause: Every type of hard disk is prone to develop bad sectors 'naturally' but this is not always the case. Harsh operating conditions (eg. high temperatures, vibration etc) can cause hard disks to develop a large number of bad sectors very quickly.

Recovery possibilities: Data Clinic are often able to correctly reconstruct and recover data that occupies bad sectors, by using our in-house data recovery hardware tool "Diskmaster"

Do Not: Under no circumstances should you run a repair utility such as Scandisk or Chkdsk. This software is unable to repair bad sector damage and there is a very high probability that the files you are trying to recover will become unrecoverable. You can read more about the use and misuse of Scandisk and Chkdsk here.

What should I do?: Call the Data Clinic and talk your problem through with us on 0870 140 2525, or fill out our auto-form and we'll call you back

bad sectors affect all types of hard disk drive eventually
Bad sectors effect all hard disk drives eventually. Data Clinic are often able to recover data that has been lost to bad sectors

Further information: You may be interested to read our page on a Maxtor DiamondMax 8 hard disk drive that was suffering from bad sectors. We were able to repair these sectors and recover the data, additionally we used an oscilloscope to monitor how hard disks behave when they encounter bad sectors.

> Related page: CRC errors on hard disk drives
> Related page: How bad sector repair software works
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