Friday, April 6, 2012

Why Bad Sectors are Bad For a Hard Drive

By Brian Shaw


A bad sector is a term utilized to refer to a PC problem where information cannot be written onto a sector of the disk, can't be accessed by the system software or simply cannot be used due to permanent damage. A sector is a slice or subdivision of a track on a magnetic or optical disk.

Bad sectors are generally detected by disk application software such CHKDSK, SCANDISK and badblock. When these bad sectors are spotted by application software, they're excluded from usage and the OS 'skips ' on them.

Today's operating systems map out a hard disk and avoid bad sectors so they aren't used even when reformatting. Additionally, modern hard drives come with additional sectors to to substitute for the bad sectors. This is a kind of buffering allowance in the event of produce defects in hard disk sectors. When formatting a drive, the spare sectors are tapped to replace the bad sectors.

Info on hard disk bad sectors run the danger of getting corrupted and permanently destroyed. The reasons behind hard disk bad sectors are manufacturing defects in software or mess ups in the read/write heads which render the info on the sectors illegible. This is a slightly mild case of bad sector which can often be solved by an easy act of overwriting on and thus completely erasing the disk information.

A threatening case of having bad sectors is that due to mechanical faults as this kind of problem rapidly breeds further bad sectors. A head crash is one example where the read/write head crash on the surface of the platter and sets off ripples of damage across the disk. As mentioned previously, spare sectors may replace the bad ones during formatting but if the bad sectors are yet propagating due to loose particles on the disk or some disk gaffes, the disk is still doomed to die soon. It is urgent that info be saved as soon as possible before the disk finally expires, and that is where a data recovery professional can be helpful.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment