A bad sector is nothing but a sector on a computer’s hard disk or flash memory that can’t be used due to permanent damage like physical damage to the hard disk surface or failed flash memory transistors. It’s typically detected by disk utility tool like scandisk on Microsoft systems, or bad blocks on the UNIX systems. When you found this, then these programs might mark the sectors as unusable and the OS skips them later on. When the file uses a sector that’s marked as ‘bad’ by the disk utility then your bad sectors of the file is remapped and also the unreadable data is lost.
Bad sectors could be caused by physical disturbance or because of logical problems for example because of viruses, configuration problems etc. Sometimes, you may lose your computer data from hard drive due to bad sectors. In such circumstances, you don’t have to worry since you can easily recover data from hard drive having bad sectors on vista with the aid of hard disk recovery software. This tool can also be used to recover data now i.e. recovers the deleted or lost data from flash memory cards, external USB drives, etc. The number of symptoms of a bad hard drive is described below.
- Your system might experience the screen freezes for more time that does not let you open and access the files.
- You might find the altered and corrupted files/folders, which you can’t open to access the information or data.
- Your system might ask you constantly to scan the hard disk at boot up by using inbuilt disk fix utilities.
- You might encounter with unwanted error messages such as “Cyclic Redundancy Error”, which implies that the hard drive has bad sectors.
Whenever a hard disk drive controller detects the bad sectors, it substitutes that bad sector with the spare sectors. Some hard drive has less numbers of spare sectors at the end and some hard drive includes a number of spare sectors. Disk controllers typically manage to be able to remap the bad sectors by hiding them fully from the Operating-system. Thus, the Operating-system won’t consider the bad sector further to keep the data. Loss of data also occurs during formatting of hard drive.
With the help of hard disk recovery software, you can easily recover the data lost because of bad sectors. It makes a copy of the hard disk drive sector by sector referred to as Disk image in order to bypass the bad sectors after which retrieves the lost data from the disk image file. The disk image file contains the copy of structure of the hard disk and contents. It lets you to view the recuperated data after the data recovery process. You are able to download this utility for the recovery results.