Top 4 Hard Drive Repair Solutions to Fix Hard Drive Windows 10 [Partition Magic]

By Irene | Follow | Last Updated December 03, 2020

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Summary :

Hard drives can run into problems sometimes. This article will show you how to make hard drive repair and recover data from a hard drive. When your hard drive needs to be repaired, you can try the top 4 solutions in this article to fix the hard drive.

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When your hard drive is corrupt or you encounter other hard drive errors, the data on the hard drive can be inaccessible and unreadable. How to make hard disk repair Windows 10? If you don’t know any solutions, this article can be a big help.

The following contents will show you some ways to make HDD repair. Before you try the following solutions, you can try some simple fixes to repair the disk errors. For example, try to unplug the internal drive and connect it again to see if Windows can read your storage device. You can also try another USB port on your computer if your hard drive is external.

If simple fixes cannot help you, then you can follow the methods in this post to make hard disk repair Windows 10 by yourself.

Solution 1. Reinstall Your Hard Drive’s Driver

If your computer cannot read your external hard drive, you can connect it to another PC to see if the drive can be read and work normally. If it works, you can make external hard drive repair by reinstalling the device drivers on your computer. Here are detailed steps for you to reinstall your hard drive’s drivers.

Step 1. Input Device Manager in the Windows 10 Cortana search box and click on the best match to open the device manager.

Step 2. Locate Disk drives and double click it.

Step 3. Then you will see all disks on your computer displayed here. Right-click the hard disk with hard drive failure and then click Uninstall device to uninstall the drive.

Step 4. Restart the computer and connect the hard drive. The drivers will start installing automatically in most cases.

After restarting, you can check if your external hard drive can be read. If this solution doesn’t work, you can try the next method.

Solution 2. Check and Fix Hard Drive Errors with Disk Repair Tool

You can use a professional HDD repair tool to fix hard drive issues. There are many wonderful third-party hard disk repair software that you can use to diagnose and fix hard drive issues. Be sure to choose a reliable one.

Here I recommend you to choose the third-party disk utility — MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition. It is the professional hard drive repair software & an all-in-one partition manager, which can help you check and fix hard drive errors in just a few clicks.

The MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition can also help you manage computer hard drives in a flexible way with its features like extend partition, resize partition, format partition, migrate OS to SSD/HD, copy disk, convert MBR to GPT and so on.

So the free hard disk repair tool is worth trying. Now let’s see the detailed steps.

Step 1. Download the disk utility MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer and launch it to get the main interface.

Step 2. Then select the partition on a hard disk and choose Check File System on the left action panel.

Step 3. As you can see, here are two options for you to choose from. The option Check only will only scan your hard drive for errors but it will not fix detected file system errors automatically. The option Check and fix detected errors will scan the drive and fix any file system errors found. To make hard drive repair, please select Check & fix detected errors and click Start.

Step 4. After the hard drive repair is completed, you can close the program.

Solution 3. Repair Hard Disk Errors with CHKDSK Utility

If the above fixes cannot help you fix the errors, you can run the Windows CHKDSK utility with CMD (via admin mode) to perform hard drive repair on Windows 10. You can access the Windows 10 disk utility via command prompt. Here are detailed steps.

Step 1. To access the Windows built-in hard drive repair tool, type cmd in the Windows 10 Cortana search box. Then right-click the best match then choose Run as administrator.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type CHKDSK *: /f /r (* represents the drive letter of the specific drive that you want to repair) and then hit Enter. With this command, the hard drive is analyzed track-by-track to detect and fix recoverable data on the defective areas. It will give you all the details here.

The commonly used parameters /f and /r have different meanings:

• /f – fix any errors it detected.
• /r – Locate bad sectors on the drive and try to recover any and all readable information from them.

Step 3. After the error checking is completed, you can type exit to close the command prompt window.

This way should help you fix hard drive errors effectively. If your hard drive is working properly, you can backup important files as soon as possible. Sometimes the dead drive just occurs without notice.

Solution 4. Format the Hard Drive

Another effective method to eliminate hard drive errors is to format the hard drive. As you know, a hard drive can become RAW due to virus attack, improper operations, bad sectors or power outage. In this case, you are unable to access the hard drive data. You can format the hard drive to fix the error.

However, if you just format the hard drive directly, all files will be deleted including important files in it. So the best way is to recover the data to another drive with a piece of professional hard drive recovery software firstly. Then format the drive with a professional drive formatting tool.

Recover Data Before Formatting the Drive

To make internal hard drive data recovery, my recommendation is to use reputable and reliable hard drive recovery software MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate.

It can help you recover all kinds of files including photos, audio, music, videos, emails archives, documents from various storage media like HDD, SSD, SD card, USB drive, digital camera, memory stick and so on.

Step 1. Get the hard drive recovery software MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate by clicking the following button. Install it on your computer and get it registered.

Step 2. After registration, you will get the main interface. Then launch Data Recovery on the top toolbar.

Step 3. Select the drive you want to recover data from and click Scan button on the lower right corner.

Here are three parts on the Data Recovery interface:

• Recovery Result:You will see the last scanning result record here and you can load recovery result by yourself to recover files directly.
• Logical Drive:All existing partitions on your computers will be listed here. If a partition does not have drive letters, it will be arranged at the end of the list.
• Hard Disk:All disks on your computer will be listed here, including external hard drive, SSD, USB drive, etc. You can also select a disk to scan directly.

Besides, if there are lost partitions or unallocated spaces on your hard drive, there will be Lost Partition or Unallocated Space parts.

Step 4. The data recovery software is scanning your drive now. You can click Pause or Stop button near the progress bar to pause or stop the scanning process if you find what you want. You can wait for the scanning to complete.

Step 5. Check needed files in the recovery result. You can preview a picture or .txt file which is smaller than 20MB. At last, click Save to save the recovered files.

Step 7. Choose a directory to save the needed files. It is recommended to save the recovered files on another drive. Otherwise, the lost/deleted data could be overwritten. Make sure you save files to a safe place.

During the repair process, if the hard drive you’re trying to fix contains important files, then you can also use the above data recovery tool to extract the documents, photos, music, videos, emails and other files from the hard drive easily.

Format Hard Drive

Now, you can format a hard drive that’s not working properly to fix the disk failure. Here are detailed steps to tell you how to format hard drive Windows 10 with the free disk utility.

Step 1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro Ultimate and get the main interface.

Step 2. Select the drive and choose Format Partition from the left action panel.

Step 3. Then specify the partition label, file system as well as cluster size on this page. Then click OK to continue.

Step 4. Click Apply on the upper right corner to allow the pending operations.

After formatting, you can use your hard drive as normal.

Conclusion

Hard drive can become damaged or corrupted due to various hard drive errors like bad sectors on hard drive, file system corruptions. So you must learn these basic tips. After reading this article, you may find that hard drive repair is not so complicated.

If you have any question about how to make hard drive repair Windows 10 when there are hard drive errors, you can leave a message in the following comment zone and we will reply as soon as possible. If you have better solution, don’t hesitate to share it with us. If you need any help when using MiniTool software, you may contact us via [email protected] .

Bad Sector Repair: How to Fix Bad Sectors on HDD in Windows 10/8/7

What to do when aВ hard disk hasВ bad sectors? This guide includes the best solutions to repair bad sectors on hardВ drive and protect your data effectively.

Occasionally, when one or more bad sectors come upon aВ hard disk, the disk will go bad. When this happens, the data in those bad sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable. In order to help you performВ bad sectors repair on hard drive and rescue your data as soon as possible, we suggest you follow through with the tips below before you take action to repair bad sectors.

HDD Bad Sector OverviewВ

Before you start, learn the basic information of bad sectors to pick a better solution and remove bad sectors from your drive.

What Is Bad Sector

According to Wikipedia and professional IT sites, the bad sector is defied a permanently managed storage unit on a hard disk. Once the sector gets damaged, all saved information in that section is lost. Usually, the operating system like Windows 10/8/7 will skip the bad sector once it’s found and marked.

Two types of Bad Sectors

Basically, there are two types of bad sectors — Hard bad sector (also called Physical bad sector) and Soft bad sector (also known as the Logical bad sector).

Hard bad sector is mainly caused by physical damage (in 1,2 causes), such as manufacturing error, physical broken, etc. While the soft bad sector is usually related to software issues (in the 3rd cause) such as improper operations on hard drive, file system error, etc.

Due to the different causes of bad sectors, the ways to repairing bad sectors are also varied. Continue reading, you will find the best solutions to repair bad sectors on your hard drive in Windows 10/8/7.

How to Check Bad Sectors in Hard Disk on Windows 10/8/7

Although we have explained that bad sectors can be defined as physical and logical bad sectors, you may still don’t know how to distinguish them. Here is a simple rule for you to tell the difference: whether you can check bad sectors on your drive.

If you can run a disk checking andВ get the basic information about bad sectors, it’s highly possible that your drive is having soft bad sectors. If not, the situation will become worse and it could be the hard bad sectors.

To know about the amount of the bad sectors clearly, a professional and free disk managementВ tool is recommended — EaseUS Partition Master Free. It can check for bad sectors on a hard disk on Windows 10/8/7 for free with one click.

Besides, it has comprehensive hard drive partitioning options, such as resize/move partitions, create, merge, format, and wipe partitions. You can also use it to convert FAT32 to NTFS without losing data,В convert MBR disk to GPT disk, or vice versa.В

Step 1. Download EaseUS Partition Master and install it. Right-click the disk that you want to check, and then click «Surface test».

Step 2.В The operation will be immediately performed. Bad sectors will be marked as red.

When there are too many bad sectors, the scanning process will be stuck. Wait patiently. After the process, you could know exactly how many bad sectors are there.

How to Fix BadВ Bad Sectors on HDD inВ Windows 10

As youВ know that when the operating system detects bad sectors, it would mark them as unusable no matter it’s logical or physical bad sectors. As a result, data loss and the loss of disk capacity are unavoidable.В Then, how to fix and remove bad sectors from the hard disk? Read on forВ in-depth tutorials.В

First Thing to Do: Back Up and Clone HDD to a Good Hard Drive (Skip Bad Sectors)

If the disk contains many soft bad sectors, always stuck or slow to load data on the computer, or the drive is failing due to physical bad sectors, it is impossible to repairВ bad sectors.В The wise choice is to back up and save your data at first. But how to copy a hard drive with bad sectors?

EaseUS Disk Copy,В a powerful disk cloning software,В can skip the bad sectors and cloneВ disk toВ make a full copy of your hard drive.

Support Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP

Some key features of EaseUS disk cloning software:

• Transfer OS to new hard drive without reinstalling Windows and applications
• Clone a larger HDD to a smaller SSD
• Clone hard drive to USB flash drive easily

Download and apply this disk copy software to upgrade and clone HDDВ withВ bad sectors to a healthy hard drive without effort.

EaseUS Disk Copy

Replace the Disk with a Good one

If your computer can’t boot into your operating system,В create a bootable USBВ in advance, and then followВ the steps below to copy your data.В Remember to connect theВ new hard drive to the computer as a storage device.

Step 1: Choose «Disk mode» and select the smaller hard drive as the source disk.

Step 2: Choose the bigger hard drive to save the data and then click «Next».

Step 3: A warning message tells you that the data on the destination disk will be overwritten. Click “OK” to continue if you do not have important data on the destination disk.

Step 4: Edit the disk layout and then click «Proceed» to continue.

• «Autofit the disk» resize the layout on destination disk according to the size of it to make the disk as the best status.
• «Copy as the source» doesn’t change anything on destination disk and the layout is same as source disk.
• «Edit disk layout» allows you to manually resize/move partition layout on this destination disk.

Step 5: Wait for the process to complete.

When the cloning process finishes, shut down your computer, insert the newly upgrade hard drive into your computer and replace the old drive. If it’s a system drive, set the computer to boot from a new hard drive instead of the old one in BIOS.

Support Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP

Repair Soft/Logical Bad Sectors in WindowsВ

If your hard drive is experiencing one or more bad sectors, still accessible, follow our instructions to fix yourВ problem and remove bad sectorsВ permanently fromВ hard disk with bad sectors repair tools.В

В 1. Run CHKDSK Command and Format Hard Drive

If there only a few bad sectors on your drive, you can run CHKDSK command and format the drive to repair those bad sectors:

Step 1. Run the CHKDSK command to fix soft bad sectors.

1. Press the Windows key and type cmd.

2. Right-clickВ «CommandВ Prompt»В andВ chooseВ «RunВ asВ administrator».

3. Type chkdsk E: /f /r /x and hit Enter. (Replace E with the drive letter of your hard drive.)

Step 2. Format hard drive to usable again

1. Open Windows File Explorer, locate and right-click on your hard drive.

2. Select «Format», reset the file system as NTFS, tick «Quick Format» and click «Start».

After this, you can save your data back to your hard drive and use it again.

2. Use a free disk check and repair tool to fix bad sectorsВ

EaseUS partition management software offers the simplest methodВ to check and fixВ hard drive errors. You can apply its Check File System option to checkВ and repair hard disk partition errors in Windows 10.

В in Windows 10, 8, or other Windows OS with one-click. Just download and start EaseUS partition management software, locate the hard disk, then run the check file system.

Hard/Physical Bad SectorsВ Repair

Mostly, when your hard drive contains hard bad sectors, you cannot repair bad sectors by using normal solutions. The only possible way is to low-level format the drive, resetting the hard drive blocks, clusters, and sectors.

A low-level format is also called a physical format. Modern hard drives are low-level formatted at the factory for the life of the drive. A PC cannot perform an LLF on a modern IDE/ATA or SCSI hard disk, and doing so would destroy the hard disk. That is to say, you can’t repair a bad sector.

To resolve this issue, you have two choices:

1. Send your hard drive to the manufacturer or a local repair center, customize for low-level format.

2. Choose to clone the disk with bad sectors to a good hard driveВ to avoid the hard disk getting worse with more bad sectors.

Summary of Bad Sector Repair

This page provides the complete guide to help youВ fix bad sectors on HDD. To removeВ bad sectors from hard disk permanently, you can use the Windows CHKDSK command or EaseUS free partitioning software. With theВ two bad sector repair tools, you can efficientlyВ fix and repair bad sectors on the hard drive, external storage devices.

In contrast to logical bad sectors, if there are physical bad sectors on your hard drive, it’s almost impossible to repair your hard disk. You need to replace it with a new hard HDD. So, to avoid data loss,В when you find bad sectors on your disk, be sure to use EaseUS disk clone software to copy and make a backup of your data.В

Support Windows 10/8.1/8/7/Vista/XP

More Information About Bad Sectors

Some people may also have questions about diagnosing if bad sectors are on your drive. You may judge from the following two factors:

1. What are the symptoms of bad sectors?

When you meet one of the following symptoms, your hard drive or external storage devices may contain bad sectors:

• Strange friction sound when booting or running hard drive.
• System pops up an error message, like «Sector not found» or «General error in reading drive C», etc.
• Disk won’t format, getting an error.
• Scandisk (a diagnostic utility) automatically runs when the system is booted.
• Some operations are stuck or become random to a certain process.

2. What are the causes of hard bad sectors?

1. Hard drive was shipped from the factory with bad sectors. (e.g. SSD disk)

2. Physical damage, like:

• Manufacturing error
• Accidental drop, break, etc.
• The touch of the hard drive header to the platter
• Dust

3. What are the causes of soft bad sectors

1. Software issue, like:

• Sudden shutdown of the computer
• Sectors that contain data don’t match the error-correction code
• Viruses, malware messes computers, cause bad sectors.

4. How to avoid bad sectors?

Some of you may also want to know how to protect the drive from bad sector errors. Here are some tips:

• Run Disk Check or CHKDSK command on your drive regularly to remove soft bad sectors.
• Run virus cleaner software to remove viruses and malware.
• Execute proper operations on your drive, for example: close all running programs before shutting down the computer.