The hard drive is the storage of all information on the computer. Of course, for different users, information is of different value, but hardly anyone wants to lose it entirely. In order to avoid this unpleasant situation, when the hard disk (HDD) fails due to the presence of bad sectors or accumulated errors on it, you must constantly check its condition.
HDD is a very "delicate" part of the computer for the reason that disks rotate at great speed inside it, and reading heads move above them. By and large, a hard drive can last for years if kept at the right temperature. In addition, hard drives are "afraid" of vibration and sharp shocks. Therefore, laptops and netbooks are most prone to destruction of HDDs. It is they who most often need to check the disk for bad sectors.
There are a lot of breakdowns of hard drives: from physical wear to problems with microcontrollers. There is no point in writing about them in this article. We limit ourselves to onlywarnings and what a disk error check is.
HDD records information on special tracks - sectors. If one of them is damaged, then the information contained in it is lost. And, most likely, this track will be unable to store information in the future. It is checking the surface of the disk that allows you to identify bad sectors. You can damage them in two ways: by making incorrect formatting or by writing information incorrectly. This type of error is called logical corruption. And you can drop the disk - this will be physical damage to the sectors. The second option is the most dangerous, as it can render the entire HDD unusable. Notebooks are subjected to constant vibrations and shocks during transfer, this negatively affects the condition of the surface of the disks.
Checking the disk can be done using regular Windows tools, for this you should go to "My Computer", select the required HDD with the right mouse button, go to "Properties". Next, go to the "Service" tab, select "Perform verification" and mark the necessary items. This utility also allows you to restore sectors. By the way, physical damage is unlikely to be repaired. To check the system disk (on which the operating system is installed), you will need to reboot. At the end of the work, you will be able to see the number of bad sectors and the number that could be restored.
For visual viewinghard drive status, the HDD Scan utility is perfect. The time it takes to check a hard drive depends on its size and the power of your computer. In the program window, you will see graphic marks of entire tracks in green and red - broken ones. Checking the disk for bad sectors will allow you to estimate the number of damaged tracks as a percentage. Also, in many utilities it is possible to see the status of disks in a graphical form. Some programs have the function of recovering bad sectors.
I would like to note that checking the disk for errors will determine the current state of your HDD. If it is critical, then you need to worry about replacing the drive.
