Recovering data from hard disk drives containing bad sectors

Bad Sector 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 of Hard Drives with Bad Sectors

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 common Windows error messages that often appear when a drive has bad sectors.

Bad Sector Causes

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.

Recovering Data from Hard Disk Drives with Bad Sectors

Bad sector severity can vary widely from disk to disk. Sometimes, just a small area of a hard disk can be affected. Problems like this are often easy to bypass and are not often noticed. The real problems come when the number of bad sectors on a hard drive have got so large that performance is affected: disk access is slow and files and folders can disappear of become inaccessible. Once this has happened it’s time to assess the value of the data on the drive. If your data is valuable you will need to:
1. Disconnect the drive a leave it powered off. Bad sectors often spread very quickly across a disk, but no further harm can be done if the drive is powered off.
2. Recovering data from hard drives with this number of bad sectors requires hardware and not software (which will often make matters worse by stressing the heads of the hard drive and eventually causing complete drive failure and loss of data).
3. Call us on 0871 977 2525 – we can help.