Showing posts with label causes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label causes. Show all posts
Friday, November 11, 2016
Causes Fixes Prevention of Bad Sectors in Your Hard Drive
Causes Fixes Prevention of Bad Sectors in Your Hard Drive
A sector in a hard drive platter is a small cluster or area where actual data is stored. Normal hard drive can have from 1 to 6 platters and a single platter can have over millions of sectors. Including platter, any hard drive will also have heads, spindle motor, firmware, PCB etc. responsible for its smooth functioning. However, being an electronic device, hard drive may have one or more failing mechanical equipments which gives birth to data inaccessibility, permanent hard drive failure or system startup failure etc. After which, one may not able to retrieve the stored content as well as permanently looses accessibility to their system.
Bad sectors on the hard drive platter could be developed throughout its lifespan which may make OS unable to read or write information on that particular section. Moreover, bad sector would stress the read/write head of hard drive and causes subsequent delays in accessing the memory/information. As a result, hard drive will start failing, throwing system freezes or sometime gives black or blue screen of death (BSOD).
What causes bad sectors?
Sector is usually a block of information stored on the hard disk and having standard size of 512 bytes. These sectors can easily become bad due to imperfections of this real world. Though, you can found some most common causes which contributes heavily towards building bad sectors and blocks on the hard drive platter,
Bad sectors on the hard drive platter could be developed throughout its lifespan which may make OS unable to read or write information on that particular section. Moreover, bad sector would stress the read/write head of hard drive and causes subsequent delays in accessing the memory/information. As a result, hard drive will start failing, throwing system freezes or sometime gives black or blue screen of death (BSOD).
What causes bad sectors?
Sector is usually a block of information stored on the hard disk and having standard size of 512 bytes. These sectors can easily become bad due to imperfections of this real world. Though, you can found some most common causes which contributes heavily towards building bad sectors and blocks on the hard drive platter,
- System infected with Virus / Trojan / Malware – Any malicious computer program can physically harm your computer and damage surfaces of the platter or inject wrong information on the sector. However, Some DOS attacks were used to misguide operating system to treat sector as bad even if they werent.
- Abnormal Shutdown: Not properly shutting down the PC may results in wrong positioning of read/write head which tends to move around the platters when system is running. Sometime, sudden system shutdown due to power failure could make platters to get in contact with the read/write arm and damage that area called sectors.
- Power Surge: Improper power supply or not using the reliable electricity medium causes hard drive equipments to be overheated sometime and thus, damages the magnetic area around the hard drive platter.
- Aging Equipments: Being an electronic device, hard drive equipments may start wearing out and bad sectors were created over time. As this process seems bit natural and depends on the overall hard drive age, these cases are least considered but worth checking.
- Faulty Heads: Heads plays crucial role in retrieving or storing information on/from the platter. It keeps rotating over platter without making contacts to the platter but when it does, produces bad sectors. Shaking or moving hard drive while any ongoing operation could make the head to get in contact with the platter and again, produces bad sectors.
- Manufacturer faults: Bad supplier or low quality manufacturer could deliver hard drive with poor quality equipments which reduces overall lifespan of your hard drive. Bad sectors were developed quite frequently on hard drive with bad equipments. Most often, bad sectors were already created when the drive is first manufactured.
Once the bad sector is developed, it starts damaging nearby sectors and soon make your whole hard drive with thousands of bad sectors. You can use various hard disk checker utility like S.M.A.R.T. To check hard drive for bad sectors as well as other crucial parameters like spin rotation, heat, equipments status and many more.
Type of Bad Sectors
There are usually two types of bad sectors took place in modern as well as traditional hard drives:
Hard or Mechanical or Physical are the one caused by heads after coming in contact with platter surface of the hard drive. For ex, if the computer is bumped or dropped while reading/writing data from/to the disk would make hard drive heads to crash or damage the area. Extreme heat, faulty heads, dust or other ageing equipments could also contributes heavily towards hard bad sectors.
Once the hard bad sectors is created, it can only be prevented, neither removed or reformed. Best bet is copy/save all your important stuff into another hard drive and replace the drive as soon as possible to stay away from various catastrophic data loss situations.
Though, if your hard drive fails due to hard bad sectors and youve lost any or all your important data, using data recovery services would be the last hope. Highly cleaned room with skilled equipments where special treatments were used to carefully open hard drive equipments and recover data from the storage area.
Soft or logical bad sectors are less drastic and delivers minimum harm to your PC or the stored data. It is created when an error correction code of a sector cant verify the content of the same sector due to virus/threats injection on the BIOS section, improper system shutdown or directory structure corruption.
Soft bad sectors can be repaired by using low level formatting (quick format) or disk check/repair tools which fills zeros in all the soft bad sectors. Disk wiping process is pretty effective and completely removes soft bad sectors around the hard drive, however you might permanently lose the stored data and data recovery isnt possible even by using professional recovery program.
How to repair bad sectors?
There are choices to repair bad sectors by using either inbuilt utility or software provided from third party. As there is no guarantee of repairing bad sectors, you can still try any of the options mentioned below.
Using Inbuilt Utility
Various inbuilt check disk utility is available to check hard drive health status or any running issues and repair them immediately. Microsoft provided this utility for free of cost with Windows to help troubleshoot file system errors, scan and fix bad sectors found around the hard drive.
Running check disk utility is completely safe and doesnt harm overall functioning of your PC. As check disk utility will perform scan and recovery concurrently, this process might takes time little longer than usual.
Heres how you can start check disk utility in your PC:
Type of Bad Sectors
There are usually two types of bad sectors took place in modern as well as traditional hard drives:
Hard or Mechanical or Physical are the one caused by heads after coming in contact with platter surface of the hard drive. For ex, if the computer is bumped or dropped while reading/writing data from/to the disk would make hard drive heads to crash or damage the area. Extreme heat, faulty heads, dust or other ageing equipments could also contributes heavily towards hard bad sectors.
Once the hard bad sectors is created, it can only be prevented, neither removed or reformed. Best bet is copy/save all your important stuff into another hard drive and replace the drive as soon as possible to stay away from various catastrophic data loss situations.
Though, if your hard drive fails due to hard bad sectors and youve lost any or all your important data, using data recovery services would be the last hope. Highly cleaned room with skilled equipments where special treatments were used to carefully open hard drive equipments and recover data from the storage area.
Soft or logical bad sectors are less drastic and delivers minimum harm to your PC or the stored data. It is created when an error correction code of a sector cant verify the content of the same sector due to virus/threats injection on the BIOS section, improper system shutdown or directory structure corruption.
Soft bad sectors can be repaired by using low level formatting (quick format) or disk check/repair tools which fills zeros in all the soft bad sectors. Disk wiping process is pretty effective and completely removes soft bad sectors around the hard drive, however you might permanently lose the stored data and data recovery isnt possible even by using professional recovery program.
How to repair bad sectors?
There are choices to repair bad sectors by using either inbuilt utility or software provided from third party. As there is no guarantee of repairing bad sectors, you can still try any of the options mentioned below.
Using Inbuilt Utility
Various inbuilt check disk utility is available to check hard drive health status or any running issues and repair them immediately. Microsoft provided this utility for free of cost with Windows to help troubleshoot file system errors, scan and fix bad sectors found around the hard drive.
Running check disk utility is completely safe and doesnt harm overall functioning of your PC. As check disk utility will perform scan and recovery concurrently, this process might takes time little longer than usual.
Heres how you can start check disk utility in your PC:
- Double click on My Computer from the desktop or press window button + E.
- Right click on the desired drive you want to check and choose properties. Note:You cant check and repair all the drive at once.
- From the opened properties window, select Tools tab and click on Check Now.
- Check disk box will open containing options like Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Mark both the options or can leave the first one only if you wants to check only hard drive for bad sectors and repair it.
- Click on Start to initiate check disk operation.
- Enter administrator password if requested and click OK.
- Wait for sometime and then restart PC once the operation is completed successfully.
Using third party software
Spinrite is a professional hard disk check and repair utility suitable for all the latest Windows operating system and works effectively on FAT, NTFS and Linux formatted volume. The software is self explanatory and requires simple steps to boot from DOS environment and repair almost any kind of bad sectors.
Note: Spinrite could costs your around $ 89 USD.
Preventing bad sectors in future
Below are the precautions steps you could take to avoid bad sectors from being developed around your hard drive,
- Use inbuilt disk defragmenter utility to stabilize operations and reduces stress from heads. Run this utility at least once or twice in a month or schedule it to run periodically. It also helps in managing disk spaces and thus, reducing overall burden from the heads.
- Always use, professional and recommend anti virus software to keep your system clean and malware free.
- Avoid bumping or throwing during ongoing operations.
- Use system in cooled and dust free environment.
- Use standard cables or connecting media for longer durability.
- Use proper shutdown or standard way to turn your system off. Use UPS or similar power backup devices to make sure that you always have enough time to safely shutdown your PC when the power is absent.
- Running OS repair utility could also shorten the occurrences of bad sectors around the hard drive.
Have you found bad sectors in your hard drive or planning to check, what utility youre using or the way youll recommend to repair bad sectors? Dont forget sounds all this using the comment form below.
Available link for download
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
A Look Into Causes Of Hard Drive Crash And Possible Data Recovery
A Look Into Causes Of Hard Drive Crash And Possible Data Recovery
We all are well aware that Hard Disk drive is a storage device used for storing and retrieving digital information using rapidly rotating disks known as platters coated with magnetic material. A HDD preserve its data even when it is powered off or not in use. Data is read in a random manner that means particular single blocks of data can be stored, retrieved or accessed in any order somewhat sequentially.
It consist of one or more hard swiftly rotating platters having magnetic heads, arranged on a moving actuator arm to read and write data to the surfaces.
What is a HDD Failure ?
A hard disk drive failure occurs when the drive malfunctions and the stored information cannot be accessed with a properly configured computer. A disk failure may also occur in between of normal operation, or due to an external factor such as exposure to fire or water or high magnetic fields, suffering a sharp impact , environmental contamination which leads to a head crash.
Causes of the HDD Failure
As discussed above, the most notorious cause of hard-drive failure is the head crash. The internal read-and-write head of the device usually just flying above the surface touches a platter, or scratches the magnetic data-storage surface. A head crash leads to severe data loss and data recovery attempts may cause further damage if not done by a specialist with proper equipment. Hard-drive platters are coated with a very thin layer of non-electrostatic lubricant, so that the read-and-write head will simply rebound the surface of the platter so that a collision occur.
Whereas, this head Flickr only nano-meters away from the platters surface which confirms the risk of collision. Another cause of failure can be a defective air filter. The air filters regulates the atmospheric pressure and moisture between the hard-drive cage and its outside environment. If the filter fails to catch a dust particle, then that tiny dust particle can cause a head crash if the head reach over it. After a hard-drive crash, each particle from the damaged platter and head media can cause a bad sector. In such cases, it may be possible to recover all data.
Types of HDD Failures:-
As discussed above, the most notorious cause of hard-drive failure is the head crash. The internal read-and-write head of the device usually just flying above the surface touches a platter, or scratches the magnetic data-storage surface. A head crash leads to severe data loss and data recovery attempts may cause further damage if not done by a specialist with proper equipment. Hard-drive platters are coated with a very thin layer of non-electrostatic lubricant, so that the read-and-write head will simply rebound the surface of the platter so that a collision occur.
Whereas, this head Flickr only nano-meters away from the platters surface which confirms the risk of collision. Another cause of failure can be a defective air filter. The air filters regulates the atmospheric pressure and moisture between the hard-drive cage and its outside environment. If the filter fails to catch a dust particle, then that tiny dust particle can cause a head crash if the head reach over it. After a hard-drive crash, each particle from the damaged platter and head media can cause a bad sector. In such cases, it may be possible to recover all data.
Types of HDD Failures:-
Operating system crash and a hard drive crash both are different from each other
If your are using Mac, Windows or Linux and your operating system crashes then it is called as a Logical Failure.
And, If your hard disk is not functioning properly or having some physical issues and if hard drive itself malfunctions, then such situation is known as Physical Failure.
In both the ways the data is not easily accessible but still present on the hard drive.
Of course, you should have a backup or an image of your computers hard drive and if you dont have backup, still there is hope to get back precious Gigabytes of data through a data recovery solution.
The best way to prevent damage from a hard disk crash is to take a cautious approach and back up the data stored on the drive.
Logical Failure:- Logical failure is when your computer BIOS can identify your hard drive but unable to access it then this sort of failure is known as logical failure. It may not be able to mount the partition or Operating system can simply report that no drive is present at all. In a logical failure the hard drives electronic and mechanical components are all working properly. But the failures occur due to defective media/bad platter or data corruption.
In some cases of logical failure a hard drive that rotates fine, but is not even recognized by the computer’s BIOS as being present.
Almost all logical failures can be retrieved without opening the hard drive. Whereas there are a number of logical data recovery software programs available in market. But, its important to know why your drive had a logical failure before you proceed further to recover your data.
Physical Failure?
A physical failure is any time a drive can not be accessed because of electronic malfunction or internal hardware failure.
These failures results as drive being not recognized by the computer’s BIOS or operating system, as well as repetitious clicking or grinding noises. If your hard disk is producing such kind of unusual sound, the you must power off your PC and don’t attempt to use it again until you sent your HDD to a recovery center.
The noises which a hard drive is producing is due to a head crash. A head crash happens with the arms that read the data on the surface of your hard drive’s platters smash into the rotating platter instead of gliding across it on a cushion of air like they are supposed to.This results in physical damage to that platters and can cause a complete and permanent data loss.
The only way to recover your data after a physical failure is to either replace the damaged hard drive integral or move the data platters to a donor drive where they can be recovered to a stable destination drive. This kind of recovery process is performed in a cleanroom with a special handling.
Hard Drive Failure – Resolutions.
It is not easy to fix a damaged Hard Disk Drive, there are a number of things that you have to look into when it comes to hard drive recovery. This is because hard drive problems could involve issues with the logical and physical areas. Damage on the electronic circuit board can leads to hard disk problems. Some cases of hard drive failure requires several years of experience on hard disk recovery. Consulting a hard disk recovery expert is the best way to get back your data. You will have to pay for the hard disk repair service. But if you are going to think about it, paying the services of an expert is more sensible than threaten the condition of the device and data. The hard disk recovery expert will go through the condition of the device first. He will determine if the damage is still within control and if the data can still be retrieved or not.
You Can try following mentioned Free data Recovery Tools
1) TestDisk(Windows/Mac/Linux)
2) Recuva(Windows)
3) PhotoRec(Windows/Mac/Linux
4) Restoration(Windows)
5) Undelete Plus(Windows)
Available link for download
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