Computer hard drive – Logical & physical bad sectors
Your computer’s operating system, software, and data files, including documents, images, and music, are all stored on a hard drive, often known as a hard disk or HDD.
A platter with data storage compartments makes up a hard disk drive (HDD). Your operating system, software, and original files make up this data. To read or write the information, an actuator arm moves across the platter. The actuator arm slides over the platter as it spins to speed up the operation. Due to their fragility, the actuator arm and platter are protected by a steel casing. It guards against damage to the disk under typical conditions.
The platters are separated into tracks, which are circular strips with varying radius. Magnetic cylinders are produced when two tracks on different platters have the same radius. Based on a specific arc, each plate is separated into many sectors. The sector is the name for the smallest piece of data storage.
Let’s now examine what problematic sectors are.

Bad sectors are areas of the disk where logical or physical faults prevent data from being accessed properly. A track is said to have “bad sectors on disks” if it contains such sectors. Bad sectors come in two different types. Physical bad sectors originate from physical damage and cannot be repaired, whereas logical bad sectors are brought on by software faults and may be repaired.
One of the causes of hard drive corruption is a bad sector.
You must first mark the bad sectors on the hard drive as useless before attempting to repair them. If you are unsure whether your hard drive has bad sectors, you must first check it before marking the problematic areas.
Therefore, inspect the disk and carefully mark the bad sectors.
1: In Windows’ search box, type cmd, and then click the Command Prompt’s context menu to select Run as administrator.
2: To proceed, enter the command chkdsk c:/f /r in the popup command line window.
3: A notification will inform you that Chkdsk is unable to operate because another process is using the volume. Now press Y to go on. The check disk process will be carried as once the computer restarts.
4: The faulty sectors on the HDD will be noted after the check disk procedure is complete.
Data loss or other, more serious issues could result from bad sectors on the hard drive. To prevent data loss, you should back up the files after marking the bad blocks as useless. You can use the pro recovery software for this.
Here is a list of the best data files recovery software for Windows:
Recuva Freeware and Pro version
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard
R-Studio data recovery software
DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery
Disk Drill data recovery tool
MiniTool Power Data Recovery