You have been using a laptop or pc from years and now you feel that some of your files are missing suddenly and while you are trying to transfer some data from a external source to your local computer, you get a error message which says ‘Cannot Copy – Disk Not Found’ and other similar errors which would mean that there is some serious issue with your Hard Disk Drive and there is no need to reinvest in buying a new one but the best solution for this is as follows.
First of all whenever you come to know that there is a issue with your Hard Disk Drive in the form of Damaged Sectors you need to make a note that its the time your HDD is going to fail and you should be ready with a backup of all your important data. If the damage to the sectors is limited to a single sector then its not a big issue to worry but if its related to multiple sectors you need to get a bit serious. There are generally couple disks called as platters witnin your hard disk drive which are stacked one over the other and on which the read/write heads sit between each of these platters which finally write down the information on them. Even though these are totally tight packed sometimes some external disk, smoke can make the head to crash and form few bad sectors on the disk.
This is the place where the data stored would be on a serious risk. Hence you need to first scan out all the bad sectors on your computer by using the Inbuilt feature on your Windows Operating System called as the ‘Check Disk’.
Note : Before using any of these utilities its recommended to backup all your important data on a external data source because at times you can lose everything and which cannot be retrieved later. If the Check Disk Utility would find any bad sector, it would continue with a ‘Integrity Check’ by writing data on that sector and during these Integrity Check any data which would be stored in these bad sectors would be over written.
Next Click on My Computer > Select a Partition like C:, D: etc and then right click on it, then select Properties, then click on Tools > Error Checking > Check Now
Once you click on the ‘Check Now’ option you will get a small dialogue box with few options like :
Check Disk Options –
Automatically fix file system errors
Scan for and attempt revovery of bad sectors
The Checking Disks scanning option would get started with different Phases and this can take quite a good amount of time based on your Hard Disk’s Partition Size and again if you would have selected the above listed options it would take some more time but at the end this would attempt recovery of bad sectors and keep you away from them.
