Restoring bad sectors on a raw system. How to test a hard drive in Victoria and how to fix bad sectors (bad blocks) in a running Windows

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Bad sectors are found on almost all HDDs. Especially those that are actively used for a long time. Sometimes the problem gets out of control and turns into a real disaster, destroying all data on the HDD in any partitions. To prevent this from happening, find out how to repair bad hard drive sectors at home.

What are bad sectors and why do they appear?

You can imagine a bad block as a book with the last chapter torn out. You can read it up to a certain point. But as soon as there is a gap in the pages, you will not be able to finish reading. HDD works the same way. The magnetic head reads information within the track, but in some area it encounters a damaged surface or an empty bit of information, which makes it impossible to extract the information completely.

Almost everything hard disks have broken sections. There may be one or several, and in most cases it is not scary. But over time, there are more and more of them, and they make it increasingly difficult to operate information on the HDD. Such areas can be identified scanning hard disk for bad sectors using special utilities.

There can be many reasons for the appearance of bad sectors:

impact of the disc or use in improper conditions;
interrupting recording by turning off the power;
overheating and temperature surges;
natural wear of the heads and writing disk;
low quality products.

Here you can divide bad sectors into non-recoverable and recoverable sectors. The first are those caused by shock or overheating. They are destroyed once and cannot be restored, and information, as a rule, disappears forever. The second type of bad sectors appears as a result of an interruption in the recording process. They can be revived by simply rewriting the disk.

Over time, write and read speeds may decrease. And after a slight fall of your laptop, the disk may stop working altogether. Everything would be really bad if it weren’t possible to somehow regenerate bad blocks. The fact is that hard drives have a certain reserve area, which means a potentially larger volume than stated on the receipt. Use extra space possible to transfer contents from damaged areas to it. How to recover bad sectors of a hard drive in this way is indicated below.

Danger is near

You can notice the problem not only after a hard drive failure, but also in the initial stages. You should be wary of the following signs:

Disk writing/reading speed has dropped;
unusual noise is heard when accessing the HDD;
began to overheat;
subjected to mechanical impact;
The system often crashes, and at startup chkdsk runs without permission.

As a rule, these reasons indicate the beginning of the end of your HDD. To avoid losing data, be the first to good decision there will be a backup. Move everything necessary files to another computer, flash drive, disk, and, if possible, even set up synchronization with the cloud.

Most modern hard drives check for bad sectors themselves, without user intervention. This is both good and bad, since you cannot influence the elimination of bad blocks and know about their appearance on system partitions.

When to scan?

You can scan your hard drive for errors at a certain frequency, which depends on the frequency of use of the computer and is calculated individually. Some people carry out scheduled computer maintenance once a month, others - once every six months.

For this you can use system utilities or recovery programs bad sectors hard drive. A scan should be performed immediately after detecting the problems listed above.

Scanning using standard tools

Starting with Windows 8, the system itself is capable of scanning disks on a schedule and thereby extending HDD operation. You can set up a scanning schedule at: “My Computer” / “Management” (a tab will appear in the main menu when the section is active). On Windows hard check disk for bad sectors can be carried out regular program chkdsk. The utility can be launched in several ways:

The work is not fundamentally different, so let’s consider the first option:

Open Command Prompt as Administrator. Click right click mouse on the Start menu icon or simply in the lower left corner on Windows 8 and select from the list " Command line(administrator)".
If you want to scan system disk, enter the command with the keys chkdsk /f /r to scan and immediately fix the entire disk, and chkdsk D: /f /r - to fix only partition D or any other existing one. Additionally, you can enter the /x switch to disable the volume being scanned during the scan. If you diagnose a working disk, the program will prompt you to reboot in order to complete the work without logging in.
If chkdsk finds errors in the partitions in use, it will offer to reboot and fix the sectors before the system starts.

To display all options, type help chkdsk. A list will appear showing all available keys with explanations. You can use any combinations at your discretion if you understand the essence of what is happening and possible consequences. At the end of the scan, all data about the operation will be displayed in the log.

Third party programs

In addition to the built-in chkdsk, you can use third party programs. There are many software that can recover damaged partitions.

Among the popular free software, I would like to highlight Victoria. This program for recovering bad sectors of a hard drive is well known and at one time was very popular among repairmen. The Victoria program can work in both windowed and DOS mode, which allows it to be used even on dead systems to restore information.

Victoria interface

The program is perfect for recovering bad sectors of a hard drive. Victoria is intended more for experienced users, since it contains virtually no interface and does not even have a localization tool included. But this does not prevent it from working correctly with hardware and file systems.

There are quite a lot of settings, switches and different numbers, and when you open the program for the first time, it can be difficult to navigate. But by following the steps below, let's learn how to repair bad sectors on your hard drive.

Testing and Analysis

In the Smart tab of this program you can quickly evaluate general state disk. The score is given based on analysis different meanings given in the table. There you can also view the status of each parameter individually.

For simple testing go to the Tests tab. There are quite a lot of settings in each section, so for the initial analysis you can leave everything at default. Click on the Start button and wait until testing is completed. Full check hard drive to bad sectors takes a long time. Therefore, you can safely leave testing overnight and go to bed.

Additionally, the window contains a speed graph or a color display of sectors. You can switch the view using the Grid checkbox next to the timer.

Correcting sectors

If you don’t have time to wait for several checks, then after assessing the condition, you can immediately begin treating bad sectors of the hard drive. Victoria uses the Remap method to rewrite blocks. It reassigns bad blocks to normal ones from the spare disk space. To repair bad sectors, do the following:

During the scan, the log will display all errors found and a report on the measures taken. It also indicates in which part of the disk the problems were detected.

How to trim?

Often, bad partitions predominate at the beginning or end of the disk. The thought immediately comes to mind: “What if we don’t use the space with bad sectors?” Yes, it can be cut off and no longer used. Find out which section disk space It’s better to cut it off like this:

You should only work with the system disk in DOS mode until the OS is loaded. While the backup or restored one can be marked directly from Windows. This method is good for large HDDs. But it does not help specifically restore broken partitions on the hard drive, as happens during the remap process.

Prevention

To prevent the hard drive from “dying” in your hands, it is advisable to carry out some preventative measures. Depending on the type of equipment.

If you have a laptop:

try not to hit him;
do not shake too much, especially in work time;
Do not expose to vibrations or temperature changes.

If you have desktop computer:

do not place the system unit in a damp place;
do not allow components to overheat;
although the HDD itself is sealed, the board can be damaged by a layer of dust, so get rid of it;
install additional cooling to the hard drive if the computer is actively used or the hard drive is unable to cool itself.

Defragmentation is a useful preventive measure for all hard drives. There are a lot of programs, both in-house and third-party, to carry it out.

Now you know how to repair bad sectors on your hard drive and maybe even be able to save valuable information on it if problems arise.

Hello admin, question! My computer is 5 years old and it began to freeze noticeably when working in various applications. Often, when turned on, the verification utility automatically starts hard drive for mistakes. Reinstalling Windows didn’t help and I had to contact a computer technician I knew, he scanned HDD Victoria program and I found a lot of sectors with a delay of more than 200 ms and with a delay of 600 ms (candidates for bad blocks). My friend told me what to do« Recording throughout the clearing» in other words, to perform a sector-by-sector erase of information from the hard drive. Hence the question of how to do it yourself, since my friend always has no time.

Hello friends! This article is a continuation of the story about the program for repairing hard Victoria disks and of course it would be better if, before reading this article, you...

Let me briefly remind you of what was discussed in the first article.

If your operating system slows down and freezes, and your hard drive sometimes beeps extraneous sounds, then the issue may be bad sectors (bad blocks).

There are two types of bad sectors: physical and logical.

Physical bad blocks- this is a mechanically deformed sector of the hard disk, from which it is impossible to read information, and it is also impossible to write data to it. It is impossible to correct such sectors with any programs. Built-in micro hard drive software It must detect a bad sector in time and reassign it as a normal sector from the backup track. At this moment, the faulty sector is taken out of operation and information about it is entered into a special defect list. But it often happens that bad blocks are present on the hard drive, but they are not hidden. In this case, you need to hint to the firmware built into the hard drive about the presence of bads on the hard drive using special programs on working with hard drives(Victoria, HDDScan, MHDD) and only after this the bad blocks will disappear if the outcome is favorable.

Note : for those interested, a more detailed article about bad sectors (bad blocks) .

Logical bad blocks- are much more common, this is information incorrectly written to a sector, which the magnetic head of the hard drive cannot read or reads with a significant delay; if there are many such sectors, then because of this our computer can also work slowly.

To diagnose your hard drive, you can use the Victoria program.

To make everything clear to you, I propose to consider this issue using a specific example.

Meeting 10 years later...

The other day a friend came to see me with system unit under his arm and complained about the strange operation of the computer (freezes, brakes, constant checks of the hard drive for errors when turned on), reinstallation operating system didn't help.

The system unit turned out to be perfectly clean inside, and the temperature of the processor, video card, and hard drive was normal. Of course, my suspicions fell on the hard drive, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a famous veteran WDC WD1200JS-00MHB0: capacity 120 GB SATA-II, the once popular black high-performance hard drive Caviar SE from the manufacturer Western Digital! Friends, this disk I bought it for my friend 10 years ago, pay attention to the production date - October 16, 2005!

So, let's see what's going on with our old friend's health and why he started freezing and slowing down!

I run from a flash drive CrystalDiskInfo program and I look at SMART (hard drive self-diagnosis), there is nothing criminal, technical condition- Fine.

I also launch the Victoria program directly in a running Windows 8.1 and, always as an administrator, begin to test the surface of the hard drive.

IN initial window programs select tab Standard and in the right part of the window, select the WDC WD1200JS-00MHB0 hard drive with the left mouse.

I go to the tab Tests and mark the points Ignore and read , press Start . A simple test of the hard drive surface is run without error correction. This test is not dangerous for the information located on the hard drive. I'm interested to know what the condition of the hard drive is after ten years of use. The most important thing is not to run any programs during the test, otherwise errors may occur; in general, it is ideal to perform HDD test in DOS mode using bootable flash drive Victoria programs, but we'll do that a little later.

After 30 minutes we get the test result:

In our case, there are no bad blocks, but there are sectors with large delay of more than 600 ms, look at the screenshot, everything is shown with arrows.

500 sector blocks with a delay of more than 50 ms.

31 blocks sectors with a delay of more than 200 ms.

7 sector blocks with a delay of more than 600 ms (sector blocks with such a delay are dangerous and are most likely candidates for bad blocks).

There is a small chance that these seven sectors are why the computer freezes.

I propose to use the algorithm for the hard drive in the Victoria program Write(Record, erase) in the jargon of repairmen - “Record throughout the clearing.” There will be a sector-by-sector erasure of information from the disk in blocks of 256 sectors and subsequent forced writing of zeros to the sectors. This is how you can get rid of logical bad blocks and, in some cases, physical bad blocks (a remap will occur).

Logical “bads” after such a forced write will simply lose incorrect information in their sectors; it will be overwritten with zeros.

Physical “bads” may disappear because Victoria too clearly shows them to the built-in firmware of the hard drive, and it will simply reassign the bad blocks as backup sectors from spare tracks!

On the tab Tests mark the item Write (Write, erase). Be careful, all information will be deleted from the hard drive!So make sure you select the correct drive to test. You can mark the itemDDD Enable(increased erasure).

I press Start.

Will be lost(all user data on the WD1200JS-00MHB0 hard disk will be lost).

We agree. Yes.

The process of sector-by-sector erasing information from the hard drive begins.

If in this moment launch Disk Management, we will see that all partitions on the tested hard drive are deleted along with the data.

After erasing is complete, we again perform a simple test of the hard drive surface.

On the tab Tests mark the points Ignore and read , click Start . A simple test of the hard drive surface is run without error correction.

After 30 minutes I get the result, all sectors with long delays are fixed.

· The system slows down, even if it has just been installed.

· BSOD appears when working in Windows OS ( Blue screen of death).

· The system does not start at all.

· Can't install the operating system.

· Inability to work with the disk because the files cannot be opened

· When working with external hard drives, files cannot be opened.

Sector bits (BAD) are sectors located on the surface of the hard drive that are difficult to read or not readable at all.

As a rule, the reason why a hard drive starts to perform poorly is bad sectors.

There are 2 types bad sectors– some arise as a result physical impact to the surface of the hard drive (surface scratches), others are a result of software errors, they are called logical bad sectors.

Only “Logical” bad sectors can be corrected. In order to correct such blocks, you need to overwrite them with zeros (the so-called low-level formatting), and in the future you can continue working with such sectors.

Reasons for the appearance of bad (BAD) sectors

The reasons why “Logical” bad sectors could appear is a sector of the hard drive that does not work properly, namely, does not respond to system requests (it cannot be read or cannot write data to it). When the system operates with such a sector, the system tries to access this block in order to obtain data for processing information, but the sector does not respond or responds incorrectly, in this case the system marks such a block as not working (broken) and will not access it again in the future appeals.

The reasons why “Physical” bad sectors could appear is the surface of the hard drive, with which the head could come into contact and cause a small light scratch (this can happen if the drive is shaken or hit while it is in use), or the surface could be damaged by dust or moisture that got inside the drive. In the case of SSD drives, bad sectors can appear as a result of wear, overheating of the chips or moisture. Broken sectors that were discovered after such physical impact cannot be corrected.

Ways to fix bad sectors

In order to fix bad (BAD) sectors on your PC or laptop and restore normal work hard drive, you need to use third-party programs.

You may also have heard about utilities built into the Windows OS that supposedly can help fix such blocks, but the most they can do is mark such sectors as not working and not access them again. I also do not recommend using any programs that offer to fix bad (BAD) sectors under Windows. This type of program works with the hard drive by accessing it while fixing blocks, so using such programs does not provide much of a guarantee that the bad sector will be fixed.

Consider 2 programs that are most likely to be able to fix bad sectors and restore the functionality of your hard drive.

MHDD Program

We can also zero out all sectors that are on the surface of our hard drive. We will completely erase all information from each block, and we will be able to bring the speed as close as possible work hard drive to its factory state. In order to carry out the procedure of erasing each block of the hard drive, you must enter the command “ Erase” in the line, agree to all warnings and wait for the process to complete low level formatting.

Having completed the procedures described above, we can easily get rid of “Logical” bad sectors.

What to do with “Physical” bad sectors? For this purpose, the hard drive manufacturer provided reserve space (reserve sectors), which can be replaced with broken ones. Modern hard drives do Remap on their own if such a sector suddenly appears on the surface, but sometimes they skip them, which is why the laptop or computer drive slows down. In this case, you can resort to the “REMAP” program function.

The “REMAP” option, when a bad sector is detected, tells the hard drive firmware that when reading or writing a given block, the drive accesses the backup sector, replacing the bad one. This method good if there are not many bad sectors (no more than 50-70).

In order to repartition bad sectors using MHDD programs, you need to enter the command “SCAN”, in the window that appears, select the item “Remap” and set its value to “ON”, after that press key “F 4” and watch the scanning process. We carry out this procedure only after we have tried to zero out the found sectors, so as not to mistakenly mark “Logical” broken blocks, as "Physical".

Also for large quantities bad sectors The last option for hard drive repair is to reduce the volume. This way we can cut off a part of the disk that has a very large number of “Physical” bad sectors, sacrificing disk space.

In order to do this procedure you must enter the command “HPA" and specify the values for trimming the drive.

The first value that needs to be specified in the future will be the end of the hard drive. The drive is trimmed from the end. The value is 10,000 more than the number of the last bad sector, which is displayed in the status line. In my case, this value will be 380515.

Victoria program

The Victoria program is similar to the previous program, but has slightly wider functionality; you can read the article on how to use, how to install and how to run this program.

After installing and launching the program, select the hard drive we need (if you have 2 or more).

After selecting, press the “F 4” key; in the window that appears, we are interested in 2 items.

1. In the first paragraph, select “Linear reading”, this configuration will alternately read and write all blocks of the hard drive. We select it, as it will most accurately show the presence of bad sectors

2. In the second paragraph, select “BB: Erase 256 sect”. By selecting this option, when scanning and detecting bad sectors on the surface of the hard drive, the program will try to erase such a block. This method will only fix “Logical” bad sectors.

After selecting the necessary parameters, press “Enter" and monitor the progress of the scan.

After the scanning is completed, but the bad sectors remain, you need to use the “ Remap” function.

To do this, we follow the same steps, press the “F 4” key and in the field where Ignore Bad Block is installed, set “Advanced Remap”. This parameter can help even if regular Remap is powerless, this is the advantage of the Victoria program over the previous one. After selecting the desired parameter, press “Enter" and monitor the progress of the scan.

Conclusion

By performing the above operations with your damaged hard drive, you can bring it as close as possible to its factory condition. The suggested programs should help you repair and restore your drive, but there are times when hard drives cannot be restored. The reason for this is a large number of “Physical” bad sectors that have taken up all the reserve space and there is nowhere to re-partition them; in this case, it is necessary to copy all the information to another location and replace the drive.

Read about the reasons for the appearance of bad sectors on a hard drive, how to detect and fix them. How to recover data that is damaged or lost due to bad sectors. A bad sector of a hard drive is a tiny piece of disk space that fails during operation. This sector does not respond to read or write requests.

Broken sectors can occur both on traditional magnetic hard drives, and on modern solid-state SSD drives. There are two types of bad sectors - some are the result of physical damage to the disk and cannot be fixed, others are the result of software errors and can be corrected.

Content:

Types of bad sectors

There are two types of bad sectors. They are often called "physical" or "brain teaser" broken sectors.

Physical bad sectors are hard drive space that is physically damaged. The hard drive head may have come into contact with the moving plate and damaged it, or moisture or dust may have gotten into the drive and clogged it. In case of SSD drives Broken sectors can occur as a result of wear or overheating of microcircuits or moisture. This type of bad sectors cannot be fixed.

Logical bad sectors are hard drive space that is not working properly. The operating system, trying to read data from such a bad sector, receives an adjustment error code that does not match the contents of the sector. This means something went wrong. Such sectors are marked as damaged and Windows no longer uses them to store information. However, such areas can be restored by overwriting the disk with zeros (the so-called low-level formatting). Windows' built-in Check Disk utility can also fix bad sectors.

Reasons for the appearance of physical bad sectors

Your hard drive may have bad sectors straight from the factory, especially for cheap models made in China. Modern equipment manufacturers are not perfect, so there is an error in everything. This is why SSDs are often delivered with several bad blocks. Such blocks are marked as defective and the data is moved to additional memory cells on the SSD.

IN solid state drives bad sectors appear naturally as a result of large quantity recording attempts. The contents of such sectors are moved to additional cells SSD memory until memory is exhausted. After this, as new failures appear, the storage capacity begins to decrease.

In traditional magnetic hard drives, bad sectors are often the result of physical damage. Hard drives may have manufacturing errors, moving parts of the drive are subject to normal wear and tear, the drive can be dropped causing the head to scratch the magnetic plates, air containing dust and moisture can get inside the drive and damage the drive.

Reasons for the appearance of software (logical) bad sectors

Logical bad sectors appear as a result software errors. For example, if the power supply is turned off or the power cable is unplugged while writing to the computer's hard drive, writing data to the sector is interrupted in the middle of the operation. In most cases, this results in sectors with data that fails the data write test. Such sectors are marked as bad. Viruses and other malicious software can also cause system errors and the appearance of bad sectors.

Data loss due to hard drive error

In reality, bad sectors lead to a frightening fact - even if your hard drive continues to work properly, your data can be seriously damaged, leading to loss important information. Whether it's work documents or family photos, all data stored on a computer is valuable to us. This is another reason why you should always do backups your data. Only having several backup copies on different storage media can protect you from data loss as a result of bad sectors or other disk failures.

When the computer detects a bad sector, it ignores it in further work. The data that was in this sector will be moved, so the system will not read or write this sector. Modern hard drives support S.M.A.R.T technology. and keep records of the number of moved sectors. The accounting variable is called “Reallocated Sectors”, its value can be found in free utility CrystalDiskInfo. It is possible that the contents of a bad sector cannot be read and moved. This will corrupt the file and you will no longer be able to open it.

Several bad sectors are not an indicator that the hard drive will soon fail. However, if the disk's bad sector counter regularly increases and the computer warns about this with a S.M.A.R.T. error. You should replace your drive as soon as possible.

How to check and fix bad sectors

Windows has a built-in Check Disk utility (also known as chkdsk). The program checks your hard drive for bad sectors, noting sectors with physical damage as bad, and corrects sectors with logical errors, making them available for further use.

If Windows believes that there is a problem on the hard drive related to bad sectors, the Chkdsk utility will be launched automatically when the system starts. But you can also run this utility manually at any time.

Other operating systems, including Linux and OS X, also have their own built-in disk utilities to detect bad sectors.

Bad sectors are a cruel reality of hard drives and there is no need to panic when you encounter them. However, you should always make backups important files in case of a sharp increase in the number of bad sectors. It should be remembered that the presence of a large number of bad sectors signals the imminent failure of the hard drive.

Problems with hard drives on your computers always arise spontaneously. Main indicator possible problems with HDD - time! Yes, time is not only a “doctor”, but also an absolute destroyer!

Signs indicating problems with “tin” are very banal.
Firstly, these are strange sounds that occur while your hard drive is running: squeaks, clanks and other sound effects.
Secondly, this is the heating of the surface of the hard drive case: as you know, a normal HDD does not heat up at all (well, at most its surface is slightly warm).
Thirdly, frequent crashes of the operating system: this indicates great amount damaged sectors of your hard drive (clusters).

As you can see, friends, there are quite a few reasons. How to solve a problem? There are two solutions:

buy a new hard drive;
try to “cure” the old one.

Let's consider option number two, that is, let's try to restore the damaged sectors of our HDD drive. So!

Recovering damaged hard drive sectors

First, you should know the reasons that are the catalyst for the occurrence of bad sectors on the HDD:

improper shutdown of the computer;
viruses and Trojans;
incorrect removal of programs and games.

These reasons are the most common. Of course, your hard drive will not immediately show its “disease”, because bad sectors accumulate over quite a long time (six months to a year). But the time will definitely come and your “hardness” will give you an unpleasant surprise! And to prevent this from happening, you should check your HDD from time to time for the number of damaged sectors and “heal” these same bad sectors.

How to do it? There is nothing complicated in the procedure, since it is as simple as three pennies. Go to “Start - My Computer”. Place the cursor on any local disk and right-click. A menu will appear in which you select the last line “Properties”. By clicking on “Properties”, you open the “Properties: system disk (drive letter)” window. There, in this window, you see several active tabs - click on the “Service” tab. You see: three sections have appeared and in each section there is active buttons? In the “Check the disk (Check volume for errors)” section, click on the “Check the volume” button, and then check the checkboxes in the “Scan and repair damaged sectors” and “Automatically correct system errors” items.

Next, click on “Launch” and wait for the process to complete. Warning: Troubleshooting process hard drive can take a very long time! This directly depends on the condition and “age” of your hard drive. Therefore, do not panic if your disk is being “treated” for several hours in a row: this is normal for old or heavily damaged HDDs. Attention: if your broken disk(for example, C) is currently busy with work, the OS will prompt you to check sectors the next time the system boots. We agree, click “Ok” and restart the system. That's it: now your disk has begun to “heal”. All you have to do is wait for the process to complete. After this, we check the disk for adequacy: we try to launch programs and applications, and monitor the speed and quality of execution. But still, it should be taken into account that the old hard drive will sooner or later be covered with a “copper basin”! Therefore, if your HDD is old, be prepared to replace it. Good luck!