How to Fix Corrupted Hard Drive Using CMD in Windows 11/10/8/7?

Causes and symptoms of corrupted hard drive

Why the hard drive gets corrupted or crashed? Below are some main causes.

▸Logical damage: virus attack, bad sectors, unknown file system, disk is not formatted, raw file system, lost/corrupted partition table…

▸Physical damage: short-circuit failure, damaged chip, corrupted header, dropped from high places, degradation of moving parts in the hard disk over time…

▸Improper human operations: sudden power failure, removed without safe removal, shut down system improperly…

When the hard drive gets corrupted, you will notice the following symptoms or error messages.

▶Black screen appears after the system booting screen.

▶No bootable device found, computer cannot boot successfully.

▶Clicking or grinding sound from hard drive - it is going to die soon, or won't boot already

▶It takes a much longer time for accessing files and folders. Or the files and folders become invisible and corrupt.

▶The type of file system is raw, CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.

▶“X:\ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable”.

How to fix corrupted hard drive using CMD?

When your hard drive is corrupted, you can refer to the following content to  fix corrupted hard disk using Command Prompt. Before proceeding, you had better recover data from the damaged hard drive, and move them to another safe location.

To start the corrupted hard disk repair process, first of all, you should open Command Prompt as administrator (Click Search box, input Command Prompt, right-click the icon and choose Run as administrator. Or press Win+R, input "cmd" in the elevated Run dialogue and press on Enter).

Then, type the command (“chkdsk g: /f”) and press Enter to start the error checking and fixing process for your corrupted drive: 

Note: the g: is the drive letter of the damaged hard drive, the f means fixing errors on the disk.

You can add more parameters to the command to make the scan process more rigorous.

“chkdsk g: /f /r /x”: /x locates bad sectors and recovers readable information. /r forces the volume to dismount before the scan if required.

Free alternative to CMD: fix damaged hard drive more easily

If you think the process of how to fix corrupted hard drive using CMD (running CHKDSK.exe) is a little complicated, or you encounter “CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives” error message during the repairing process, you can turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, which can support Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7, XP and Vista. It provides you with three different ways to repair damaged hard drive. Free download it and have a try now.

• 1. Check Partition for errors
• 2. Rebuild MBR of corrupted hard drive
• 3. Reformat the corrupted hard drive

1. Check Partition for errors

Step1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the partition you want to check and select “Advanced”> “Check Partition”.

Step 2. In the pop-out window, you have three options available, check and fix error by using chkdsk.exe, check error only using chkdsk.exe, and find bad sectors. Choose one according to your needs and click “OK”. Then wait for the process to complete.

Besides, you can also right-click the disk you want to scan and select the “Surface Test” to check disk error.

If checking and repairing disk/partition by chkdsk.exe fails, then you can consider the option of rebuilding the MBR of the damaged hard drive. Luckily, AOMEI Partition Assistant could also perform this task.

2. Rebuild MBR of corrupted hard drive

Step 1. Open AOMEI Partition Assistant, right-click the corrupted disk and select “Rebuild MBR”.

Step 2. Select a proper MBR type for your current operating system and click “OK”.

Step 3. In the main interface, click “Apply” on the top left corner to commit the pending operation.

Then, you can check whether the corrupted hard drive can be used normally again. If not, you can try to reformat it via this software.

3. Reformat the corrupted hard drive

Step 1. In the main interface of AOMEI Partition Assistant, right-click any partition of the corrupted disk and select “Format Partition”.

Step 2. Select a file system (ex: FAT32) and click “OK”.

Step 3. Click “Apply” to start formatting the partition.

Conclusion

Now, you know how to fix corrupted hard drive using CMD step by step. If you want to repair the damaged hard drive in an easier way, AOMEI Partition Assistant is a great choice. Moreover, its Professional Edition comes with more advanced functions like securely erasing SSD, clone MBR hard drive to GPT, convert hard drive between MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, optimizing SSD performance by 4K alignment and more.