Now I have this old hard drive of mine I found lying in my stash of things that can still be useful. I checked it out on my computer and it still works, the problem though is that it's riddled with bad sectors. I tried zeroing out the hard drive to relocate the bad sectors and possible making the drive usable still but to no luck. Do you know any way to fix it? I'm not really planning on purchasing a new one it's just that the drive seems to be in pretty good shape to use except for the bad sectors, it seems too good to go to the waste basket.
I've heard that there's software that can 'repair'' bad sectors on HDDs such as yours. From my experience, I didn't find such software that useful because after using it to repair bad sectors on an external HDD, there wasn't any noticeable difference. But maybe my HDD was damaged beyond repair? Still you can search the net for free bad sector repair software and see if it helps you. Or you can try the ones listed on the site linked to below:Log In
Perhaps you can use the hard drive but it will be hard to get rid of the bad sectors. It probably depends on which computer brand the hard drive belongs to. I'm sure you know this and maybe you can search online for various methods to minimizing the bad sectors - I doubt if you will be able to fully get rid of them. This happened to me once. I called customer support and they helped in assisting me with removing any problems from my hard drive. Unfortunately, the hard drive didn't last much longer as the problems affecting it eventually crash the hard drive altogether. So I had to get a new one.
As far as I'm concerned it cannot be fixed since bad sectors are like holes in the ozone really. But usually Windows has that warning system when you're hard drive is completely unusable anymore it gives you that warning pop up. So if you see that warning it's pretty much done for but if not, then it's pretty okay still. Have you tried Disk Doctor?
Bad sectors as far as I know cannot be fixed. I think it's just how things work with disk drives. But I do know that you can relocate (or something like that, not sure) those bad sectors so you're computer can use your hard drive and place data on good sectors of the drive. But I think if your drive has a lot of bad sectors it's pretty much a lost cause. I've had the same problem with my 1TB drive. But if you're computer tells you that it's still okay to use and that warning Windows doesn't pop out it's still pretty okay but if Windows itself warns you that that drive is broken, it's pretty much done for.
I agree with everyone has said before, bad sectors in your harddrive cannot be repaired. Currently there are special software and tools that help your computer in ignoring these bad sectors. With the right equipment and software some CRC errors can be overridden, copied to an image and the your data can be recovered. I think that once your hard drive has a bad sector it will only get worse so its best to replace the harddrive.
If your hard drive has bad sectors, I think you should backup all your files, or at least the important ones, as this usually indicates imminent failure. You can try downloading a disk monitor program to see the number of bad sectors there is, and if the number is still small and that number isn't increasing at a rapid rate, then that hard drive should still be useable for a time period until the hard drives bad sectors start to increase. Other than that, Bad sectors are more of a hardware failure on the platter, as is not something that you can fix easily.
