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Hard Drive Data Recovery From Bad Sectors

One of most common hard drive data recovery scanrios is when we are faced with multiple bad sectors on a hard drive. Since we have released our popular Windows Surface Scanner, I have gotten a ton of emails about what to do when your drive has a bunch of bad sectors.

What do bad sectors mean?

Bad sectors on a hard drive can be caused by a lot of different things, but some of the common problems we run into are:

  • The integrity of the sufaces of the platters are compromised by old age, excessive heat or misuse like being dropped in external hard drives.
  • Track data corruption which can be a result of a logical problem that leads to incorrect writing, viruses or physical movement of the sectors themselves from platter warping.
  • Read/Write heads failing make magnetic media getting worn out from excesses read/writes. There are limited amount of read/writes that every hard drive has. Each hard drive has its own MTF or mean time between failures. This is an average based upon normal computer use.
  • Damage to the actual drive system area.This is very common when there has been a loss of error correction control. There are 2 lists, a permanent defect list and a growth defect or (dynamic)) defect list. Can’t be made perfect, so there are lists that are scanning sectors which is manufactured. New maps are created as bad sectors, there is a limited pool of sectors. When pool is used up, then you get bad read writes.

When Bad Sectors Are Really Really Bad

If you have used the DTI Windows Surface Scanner and it reports bad sectors you need hard drive recovery. Call 727-345-9665 to speak with a data recovery tech.

One Response to “Hard Drive Data Recovery From Bad Sectors”

  1. raid recovery questions May 12, 2010 10:14 am #

    I used to find the notion of bad sectors quite sci fi sounding years ago, but now I seem to be dealing with them on a daily basis! A well written piece, thanks.

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