A bad sector is a sector on a computer’s disk drive or flash memory that cannot be used due to permanent damage, such as physical damage to the disk surface or failed flash memory transistors.
A sector is a small area on the surface of a hard drive or a floppy disk.
Hard drives usually have several platters. The platters are the discs which are covered with magnetic material which is used to hold data. Floppy disk drives contain only one platter.
Platters are divided into a set of concentric rings called tracks. A 1.44MB floppy disk has 160 tracks. Hard drives have thousands of tracks.
Each of these tracks is divided into smaller storage areas called sectors. A sector is the smallest storage area on a disk.
What is a Bad Sector?
Hard drives are contain millions of sectors. It is very normal for some of these sectors to be bad sectors, even when the drive is first manufactured.
In addition, a small number of sectors will normally go bad during the lifespan of a drive.
When this happens, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable.
A bad sector cannot be repaired, but it can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in that bad sector. The storage capacity of the disk will be decreased by the amount of storage space in the bad sector.
If your hard drive develops a bad sector, back the hard drive up immediately. If the bad sector was caused by a faulty drive head, the problem can quickly spread to other sectors on the disk.
Bad sector repair tools:
Bad Sectors Repair 2.0
Bad Sectors Repair 2.0 can add bad sectors of Maxtor 541DX(2B0X0H1) HDD into the factory defects list (P-LIST), up to 15,000 bad sectors can be added into the list at most.
Seagate Firmware Repair 5.0
Seagate Firmware Repair 5.0 is a demoware aiming at one-key solution towards typical firmware malfunction of Seagate Barracuda VII drives, which may manifest itself as follows:
1. HDD is not identified or identified incorrectly;
2. HDD starts the motor and then hangs.
HDD Scan and Repair 3.0
HDD Scan And Repair 3.0 is the only one known professional program which can scan HDD over 136 G directly that need not the support of computer mainboard with high speed. It can utmost afford 2000 G HDD in theory.
Maxtor Firmware repair 2.0
Maxtor Firmware Repair 2.0 is a program aiming at solution for typical firmware malfunction of Maxtor 541DX (2B020H1 2B010H1), which may manifest itself as follows:
