How to Fix the Bad Sectors Issue in Windows 11/10

Operations like backing up of files on a hard drive can fail if there are bad sectors in the drive. A bad sector means a part of the drive that cannot be further used because they could be inaccessible or physically damaged or because of a similar reason. If your machine is old, you might encounter the issue of the bad sectors quite a lot. It is very important to get the bad sectors in your drive repaired because you could lose the data in bad sectors. In this article, we explain in detail how you can easily find and repair the bad sectors in your drive.

Read on, to get rid of the issue of bad sectors in a matter of seconds!

Note: Windows cannot fix bad sectors all the time. However, Windows can definitely identify the bad sectors in your drive and mark them as bad sectors, so that data are not placed on those sectors in the future, thus saving your data.

Solution: Run CHKDSK command

Step 1: On the taskbar, click on the Search icon.



 

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Step 2: Now in the search bar, type in cmd and click on Run as administrator to open the Command Prompt in elevated mode.

 

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Step 3: When CMD launches open, copy and paste the following command and hit the Enter key.

sfc /scannow

 

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This command scans all the protected system files and replaces them if they are corrupted.

Wait while the scan runs to completion.

Step 4: Though the sfc scan is helpful in fixing corrupted system files, the main command you should use to correct the bad sectors in your device is the chkdsk command. This command runs a scan on the drive you specify and then tries to find if there are any bad sectors in it. If found, those bad sectors can be corrected, by giving the required argument list for chkdsk.

To run the chkdsk command, in the elevated cmd, type in the following command and hit the Enter key.

chkdsk <drive_letter>: /f /r

Note: The <drive_letter> should be replaced with the letter of the drive that you want to scan and fix. The argument /f fixes structural issues with the file system. The argument /r would fix the corrupted parts in your drive.

 



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That’s it. Please tell us in the comments section whether you were able to successfully repair the bad sectors in your drive.

Thank you for reading.