Updated: May 29, 2019 Home » Freeware and Software Reviews » SSD, HDD, RAM & Flash Memory

Bad sectors are basically sections of the hard disk that is inaccessible by the drive due to corruption or physical damage (not repairable via software) of the disk, they are possibly caused when the hard disk was dropped during operation. Because of that particular section is in accessible, it can cause the operating system to crash (Blue Screen of Death, aka BSOD), files missing for no reasons or frequent application crashing.

Alternative Article ➤ 20 Free Bad Sector, Corrupted, Damaged Hard Disk Data Recovery

1. Repair a disk using Disk Utility on Mac. Disk Utility can fix certain disk problems—for example, multiple apps quit unexpectedly, a file is corrupted, an external device doesn’t work properly,.
2. Windows can’t normally read Mac-formatted drives, and will offer to erase them instead. But third-party tools fill the gap and provide access to drives formatted with Apple’s HFS+ file system on Windows.

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If the bad sector is due to physical damage, the only solution is to backup the hard disk and replace it. If it is due to software corruption and it effects the MBR (Master Boost Record), it can be easily fix with a HDD regenerator software. Every Microsoft Windows come with a tool to check for system error due to bad sector. You can help solve some computer problems and improve the performance of your computer by making sure that your SSD or HDD hard disk has no errors.

Depending upon the size of your hard disk, this may take several minutes. For best results, don’t use your computer for any other tasks while it’s checking for errors. To perform this task, right click ‘C’ drive, go to ‘Properties’, then select ‘Tools’ tab and click on the ‘Check’ button.

↓ 01 – Data Lifeguard Diagnostic by WD | Windows and macOS

[ For Western Digital Hard Disk Only ] This is a Windows version of the Data LifeGuard Diagnostics. It will test WD internal and external drives. In additional, it can provide you with the model and serial of WD drives attached to the system. You will see the following options:

• Quick Test – performs SMART drive quick self-test to gather and verify the Data Lifeguard information contained on the drive.
• Extended Test – performs a Full Media Scan to detect bad sectors. Test may take several hours to complete depending on the size of the drive.
• Write Zeros – writes zeros to the drive with options of Full Erase and Quick Erase. File system and data will be lost.
• View Test Results – displays the latest test results.

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↓ 02 – SeaTools by Seagate | Windows and DOS

[ For Seagate Hard Disk Only ] SeaTools for Windows is a comprehensive, easy to use diagnostic tool that helps you quickly determine the condition of the disk drive in your external hard drive, desktop or notebook computer. It includes several tests that will examine the physical media on your Seagate, Maxtor or Samsung disk drive and any non-Seagate disk drive. SeaTools for Windows should run on both internal and external hard drives.

After testing, a large percentage of the drives returned to Seagate for warranty replacement are perfectly good drives with “No Problem Found” (NPF). Returning a drive for warranty service means system downtime and inconvenience for you in packing and returning your drive product. Before you send in a drive, it is in your best interest to determine if a replacement drive is really necessary. This hard disk diagnostic utility will help you make that determination and possibly save you time and money and preserve your data. Some typical reasons for No Problem Found are:

• File System Corruption
• Driver Corruption
• Broken Master Boot Record
• Virus and Trojan Attack
• Spyware, Adware and Keystroke loggers
• Hardware Conflicts

In addition to diagnostics tests, SeaTools also offers several features to help you manage your storage product. Seagate Instant Secure Erase is available for Self Encrypting Drives (SED), providing U.S government accepted media sanitization. See section 3.Advanced Tests and Features.

↓ 03 – Check Disk | Windows

CheckDisk is a powerful tool for searching and repairing disk errors. It is quite similar to the ScanDisk tool or chkdsk.exe, supplied with the Windows operating systems (Windows 2000,XP,Vista,7,8,10 Server 2012 (possible 2016) and admin right). You can select either standard or full tests.

The full test additionally performs a sector check. It is capable of finding bad sectors on your disk and marking them as such. The program works both with hard disks (including SCSI and RAID) and removable media. Work on CD too. With german manual. Multilingual: English, German, Czech, Spanish, French, Italien, Polish, Japan, Slovak, Chinese and Norwegian.

↓ 04 – HDDScan | Windows

HDDScan is a freeware software for hard drive diagnostics (RAID arrays servers, Flash USB and SSD drives are also supported). The program can test storage device for errors (Bad-blocks and bad sectors), show S.M.A.R.T. attributes and change some HDD parameters such as AAM, APM, etc.

Supported storage devices – IDE (ATA) and SATA HDD, SCSI (SAS) HDD, External USB drives and all major USB boxes (see Appendix A), FireWire or IEEE 1394 HDD (see Appendix A), RAID volumes made of ATA (IDE) / SATA / SCSI HDDs (surface tests only), USB Flash (pen drives) – surface tests only, and SATA / ATA SSD – solid state drives.

• Reading and analyzing identity information from ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire/SCSI HDD.
• Changing AAM, APM, PM parameters on ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire HDD.
• Reporting defect information on SCSI HDD.
• Spindle start/stop function on ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire/SCSI HDD.
• Reports can be saved in MHT format.
• SSD SMART and Identity reports.

↓ 05 – EaseUS Partition Master (Surface Test Feature) | Windows

EaseUS Partition Master, its Surface test is available for computer users. It can identify bad sectors by reviewing the hard drive. When it finds bad sectors, it will mark those sectors as bad with red color so that the system knows not to use them. It may allow them to be read, in case the data stored on the bad sector is still accessible, but they cannot be written to.

↓ 06 – Macrorit Disk Scanner | Windows

Hard disk bad sector is the most common problem and the disk is not safe to store data any longer. Bad sector will cause the important data loss and blue screen error sometimes, and even slow disk space. Macrorit Disk Scanner is a third party disk surface portable tool for scan disk bad sectors which provides you with better options and better performance than Windows native disk scanner.

With the fastest algorithm, this disk scanner free software usually could reach to the maximum speed that supported by the device. It is compatible with all recent versions of Microsoft Windows – both client and server, and supports major storage device types such as IDE and SATA HDD and SSD, SCSI, FireWire, hardware RAID, flash cards and a lot more.

• Supported Storage Devices: DE HDD, SATA HDD, SCSI HDD, FireWire HDD, SSD, USB HDD, External HDD, Hardware RAID, Floppy drive, USB flash drive, Compact flash card, Secure Digital card, Memory card/Memory stick, Micro card, Zip drive, IPod, Other storage devices
• Supported OSs: Windows Server 2003/2008/2012, SBS 2003, 2008, 2011,2012, Home Server 2011 & Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 (Both 32& 64 bit)

↓ 07 – Abelssoft CheckDrive | Windows | Free/EUR10

Hdd Repair

CheckDrive works as a “Disk Doctor” to scan for symptoms: typical hard disk failures. If issues are discovered, the tool acts immediately. If the error is not repaired in time, the affected computer can work unstable and crash frequently. The worst case occurs when hard drives fails completely – and the user suffers a lot when all the data stored is lost forever. CheckDrive analyses all the hard drives installed the computer, in order to increase the security of the data storage. The tool displays the so-called S.M.A.R.T. data and other functions and also calculates the health status of the hard disks.

• Check hard disks for errors – CheckDrive offers you an easy way of checking your PCs hard drives for errors. Even Solid-state drives (SSD) are supported.
• Shows drive information – CheckDrive shows info about your drives and determines if your hard drive needs to be cleaned or defragmented.
• Monitors hard disks in real-time – The CheckDrive Background Guard monitors all the time the values of your hard drives.

↓ 08 – GSmartControl | Windows | macOS | Linux | Free

Hard disk drive and SSD health inspection tool. GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk and solid-state drives. It allows you to inspect the drive’s SMART data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

• Automatically reports and highlights any anomalies.
• Allows enabling/disabling SMART.
• Allows enabling/disabling Automatic Offline Data Collection – a short self-check that the drive will perform automatically every four hours with no impact on performance.
• Supports configuration of global and per-drive options for smartctl.
• Performs SMART self-tests.
• Displays drive identity information, capabilities, attributes, device statistics, etc.
• Can read in smartctl output from a saved file, interpreting it as a read-only virtual device.
• Works on most smartctl-supported operating systems.

Home > Articles > Apple > Operating Systems

1. Data Rescue II

Editor's Note: Ryan Faas has updated this article for 2010. Be sure to also read The Top Mac Hard Drive Utilities, 2010 Edition.

Western Digital Hdd Repair Tool

When it comes to diagnosing and resolving problems with their computers, most Mac users rely on Disk Utility and the tools that come with Mac OS X. Disk Utility can resolve a number of problems—such as damaged hard drive directory structures and permissions problems with Mac OS X’s system files. However, Disk Utility doesn’t provide overly extensive hard drive repair and management options and it doesn’t provide any data-recovery features. Also, the tools found in Mac OS X’s Utilities folder don’t include extensive diagnostic tools. The limited capabilities of the tools that ship with Mac OS X can be augmented with a number of utilities offering advanced disk management, diagnostic, and repair capabilities. The five tools profiled here each have own particular strengths, but they all offer much greater chances of diagnosing, recovering from, and preventing major hardware, hard drive, or operating system problems.

Data Rescue II

Prosoft’s Data Rescue II is a tool that is designed to do one thing, data recovery, and designed to do it extremely well. Data Rescue II is for situations in which you need to recover critical data that has either been deleted or is stored on a damaged drive. It can work with drives that are failing because of corrupted directory structures (the most common hard drive problem) or because of physical problems with the drive.

Unlike hard drive repair tools, which work by attempting to repair or rebuild corrupted directory structures, Data Rescue doesn’t make any modifications to a drive. This enables it to have a greater chance of recovering data from a drive than the process of actually trying to repair the drive. Repairing a corrupted hard drive can often be successful, but if it fails, it can also result in further data loss. Data Rescue’s read-only approach means that it often has a better chance of recovering data than other tools.

Data Rescue ships on bootable CDs for both Power PC and Intel Macs, and it provides both an easy-to-use guided interface and an expert interface for advanced users. When attempting to recover data, it can sort available files by type, making locating and recovering specific items easier. It can be used to clone the contents of a damaged drive during recovery or to allow you to select only the files you need. The one requirement to be aware of is that Data Rescue II will require a second hard drive or partition to recover data to—this is required for its hands-off recovery approach.

If you are looking for a tool simply to recover data, there is no better tool than Data Rescue II. In fact, the ability to recover data and then simply reformat a problem drive using Disk Utility could provide consumers with a complete disk toolkit solution. The fact that it also offers you the ability to recover deleted files is icing on the cake, particularly for support professionals who often get asked to perform this type of miracle.

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