Detect and repair disk errors

How is a bad disk detected and repaired?

Hard drives contain millions of sectors.
A small number of sectors will normally go bad during the lifespan of a drive.
As you use your hard drive, it can develop bad sectors. Bad sectors slow down your hard disk performance and sometimes make data writing difficult, or even impossible. The Error Checking Utility scans the hard drive for bad sectors, and scans for file system errors to see whether certain files or folders are misplaced.

Whenever a disk develops a bad sector, the data in those sectors may be lost, but the data on the rest of the disk will be unaffected and the disk is still completely usable.

A bad sector cannot be repaired, however it can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in that bad sector. This obviously leads to the decrease in the storage capacity of your disk.

If you use your computer daily, you should run this utility once a week to help prevent data loss.

To run the Error Checking utility:

>>Close all open files.

>>Click 'Start'

>>Click on 'My Computer'

>>In the 'My Computer' window, right-click on the disk you want to search for bad sectors

>>Then click 'Properties'

>>In the 'Properties' dialog box click on the 'Tools tab'

>>In the 'Error-checking' section click on the 'Check Now'

>>This will open the 'Check Disk dialog box'

>>Select the 'Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors' box

>>Click on 'Start'

>>If Bad sectors are found, choose to fix them.


Please note:

If your hard drive develops a bad sector, create a backup of the hard drive immediately. If the bad sector is caused by a faulty drive head, the problem may quickly spread to other sectors on the disk.

##Only select the 'Automatically fix file system errors' box if you are sure that your disk contains bad sectors.