One of the essential components of a modern computer is the hard disk drive (HDD) used to store data. It consists of several plates covered with a special compound, where all information for reading data is recorded. Recently, more and more often, especially in portable computers, solid-state drives (SSD), assembled on conventional flash memory modules, are used to store information.
What are HDD Bad-sectors and why are they formed?
A computer hard disk consists of many clusters (the smallest hard disk partition for storing information). It is the combination of these clusters that allows you to store information on the hard drive. As a result of repeated overwriting, power outages during recording, mechanical stress and physical wear and tear, these clusters gradually begin to fail, thereby forming bad sectors (Bad-sector). The increase in such sectors leads to loss of information and failure of the hard drive.
It should be said right away that broken sectors cannot be treated. It is only possible to replace them with good sectors from the spare area of the disk. Hard disks released today have modern information security technology built into the controller SMART and eliminate bad areas and errors by placing them in the Bad-list.
Nevertheless, it is much more effective to use specialized scanners to detect errors on the hard disk and eliminate them. It is desirable to work with such applications from under the DOS OS.
Using the Victoria program
Victoria is the most widespread free utility targeted at a wide range of users for low-level diagnostics of the hard disk surface. In the hands of a specialist, this program is a powerful diagnostic tool for diagnosing and recovering bad sectors on SerialATA and IDE hard drives. The program combines the capabilities of most utilities from HDD manufacturers and has a huge number of useful functions. It should be noted that this utility checks the physical state of the hard.
To run the program via DOS, you need to download the ISO-image from the developer's website, and then burn it to disk. Next, restart your computer and boot the system from the CD. After starting the program, select the hard drive under test and press the Enter key. Press F4 to start testing. Then, in the window that opens, set "Linear reading" and IgnoreBadBlocks and press F4 again to start testing. After its completion, the program will generate a report showing the physical condition of the disk.
If bad sectors are detected, the program will automatically launch Remap, as a result of which they will be replaced with serviceable ones from the spare area of the disk.
In conclusion, it must be said that if bad sectors appear on the disk, then you need to think about creating a backup copy of the necessary information.
