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Hard Drive Sector RepairThe fastest way to do hard drive sector repair on any windows computers is to use a utility called Chkdsk (short for Check Disk). This old soldier has been around for many years and can be used to do many different things depending on the switch behind the command. CHKDSK is a utility that goes all the way back to good old DOS. This handy little utility can be run in
all the current versions of windows either from the DOS command line or through the Recovery Console. There are quite a few switches (tells Chkdsk to do different things, some quite technical) that you can use to accomplish different things. But for our purposes we'll keep it simple and only discuss the switches that deal with hard drive sector repair. Keep in mind that there is no actual repairing of sectors going on here exactly. What is occurring is the data files are being either reformed in readable manner or eliminated if unrecoverable. Chkdsk can marked damaged sectors and exclude them from any writing of data, which eliminates future issues so that there will be no more attempts to write data to that specific area on the hard drive. But let me warn you right now, most modern hard drives rarely have bad sectors unless the hard drive is beginning to fail. So it's certainly OK to run Chkdsk to fix data files but it you start getting sectors that will no longer reliably allow data to be written to them, it's not a good thing. That's a sure sign the the hard drive is starting to fail and it's time to think about replacing it with a new drive. Replacing a hard drive when you still have the old one function is no big deal. Replacing a failed hard drive is a much bigger project and if your important data is not backed up, a painful lesson. OK, back to the basic switches you should use on Chkdsk to deal with either fragmented data files and bad sectors. There are three basic choices on how to repair a hard drive with bad sectors using the Chkdsk utility: Chkdsk
/f This switch will fixe errors on the volume. The volume must be
locked (which basically means not in use). If CHKDSK cannot lock the volume, it offers to check it the next time the computer starts. There are several popular commercial programs that do the same type of hard drive sector repair or in ChkDsk case, file recovery. But like I've already mentioned, when you start having sector problems on a hard drive, the best long term solution is to get a new hard drive. ChkDsk works great for the occasion illegal shut downs that often leave files fragmented. But if the sector is going bad, you really should replace it before it fails. And the high end software that has the possibility to do more than just mark the bad sectors can also be pretty pricey, many as much as a new hard drive (typical a new SATA 1 Terabyte 7200 rpm hard drive can go for around $65). Spending $50 plus for a software program to fix an older hard drive doesn't really look like a good choice since new hard drives are so reasonably priced. Add to the fact that you'll probably get a faster and bigger hard drive, it's a pretty easy decision to make. The only exception might be if you are a serious computer hobbyist or professional computer guy. Then the software could be used many times and the cost benefit ratio increases dynamically. The one I recommend is Acronis® Disk Director® 11 Home and it costs around $50. It does so much more than dealing with hard drive sector repair and is very easy to learn even for novices. Just Google the name and the web page will come up. It's back up features are great and were a good reason to buy it anyway. But if you have a Windows 7 computer the same features are now available in the OS for free.. |
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