The hard drives are always prone to corruption or damage due to frequent reasons, such as, hardware malfunction, improper shutdown, virus attacks and more. These days, the most common concern among storage like hard drives is the formation of bad sectors. A bad sector is a sector on a hard drive, which may not be accessed due to permanent damage.
There are two types of bad sectors – Physical bad sectors and Logical bad sector.
The Logical bad sectors are of reparable nature and can be easily recovered using certain operating system commands or utility software. On the other hand, Physical bad sectors are irreparable.
There are special ways to recover the lost data up to the largest extent possible using hardware techniques in such cases. The four main reasons of occurrence of physical bad sectors are discussed below:
Operating system can not boot and always shows an error message – system files not found.
Blue screens in Windows like Read Attempt Failed, Unmountable Boot Volume, Inaccessible Boot Device etc.
An additional major reason is the slow wear out of frequently accessed sector(s) of hard drive like of MBR (Master Boot Record), Boot loader etc. After due course of time, these worn out sectors may become completely inaccessible.
Also there are certain sectors, which exceed their acceptable limits, exactly when the hard drive is operating. These create the maximum number of physical bad sectors and are almost unavoidable.
If the user wants to stop the formation of bad sectors, the user can find the basic cause of the bad sectors and fix it as soon as possible. Below are certain measures that the user can follow to stop the formation of bad sectors on the hard disk:
The user should avoid writing new data on the hard drive and not make any changes in the software set up in the drive.
The user should make sure that the hard disk timing is reduced to the maximum.
If the user is getting errors even after replacing the hard disk, then the problem is not with hard drive. The user needs to check the power supply and more importantly BIOS settings
The user should make sure that the hard drive in use is not out of warranty.
The length of the SATA or IDE cable should not be too long.
It is always recommended to go for a professional to recover data from physical bad sectors. In order to recover data in any form and from any media we need to be extra precautious as our data and computer files are the part and parcel of our professional and personal life.
Phoenix Hard Drive Recovery software that can recover data from logical bad sectors. For the more complex physical bad sectors we need to send our storage like hard drive(s) to a data recovery company like Stellar, which is the best in data recovery with absolutely unmatched standards. Stellar is equipped with Class-100 Clean Room facility to ensure up to hundred percent data recovery even in cases of severely damaged media.
