What are Bad Sectors on Hard Drives?
Before we talk about how to fix bad sectors on hard drive, let us understand what we mean by bad sectors. A computer hard drive is a magnetic storage disk on which data is stored by changing of its magnetization states. The disk is designed to function as a data bank with addresses for each region. It is divided into concentric tracks starting from the center, towards the outer rim. These tracks are further divided into sectors by radial division. Every sector is a unit data storage space which holds about 512 bytes of data. On a hard drive with a total memory capacity of 200 GB, there are as many as 400 million such sectors. A bad sector on hard drive is a physically damaged sector which can no longer be accessed by the operating system. When this bad sector happens to be a region where you have stored data, you get the ‘cyclic redundancy error’ as the operating system cannot retrieve data from that region. To check for integrity of written data, parity checking bits are written while
