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. Click here for more information on the Windows message that often appears when a drive has bad sectors
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"
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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 0871 977 2525, or fill
out our contact form and we'll call you back
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
> Back to the MAIN data
recovery page
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