What are Bad Sectors & How to Repair them?

Your hard drive has metal platters (as seen in the picture on the home page) that spin at very high rates of speed (5,400 to 10,0000 rpms) and are sealed in an air tight chassis (what you know to be the hard drive.) If at any time within this chassis a spec of dust, smoke, or fragment of the platter(s) are exposed to the fine magnetic needle that reads the data off those platters it could create a "bump" in the road. If you only have a couple of bad sectors you may get away with it for a while, but if you have multiple, than it is time to get a new hard drive, because it will only get worse and eventually lead to a total failure and data corruption. By running scandisk (98,ME) or chkdsk (xp) the Windows O.S. will check for these bad sectors and mark them not be used again. This method is good for buying you some time to do a backup of your data and replace the drive. You can access these tools by double clicking on my computer, right click on the hard disk that you want to check, and then go to properties. There should be a tools tab to press scandisk or check disk for errors, etc. Hard drives will fail, it is just a matter of when, why, & how. (Return to FAQ Page)