How to Repair Corrupted Hard Disk in Windows 11/10

A damaged external hard disk is very annoying. This article will walk you through how to repair a damaged hard disk using the command prompt and third-party tools - AOMEI Partition Assistant.

How to repair a corrupted hard disk?

Once the hard disk is corrupted, you may not be able to access the data on it. Thus you need to repair the corrupted hard disk. But how to fix corrupted hard dive? Here are two methods to complete this operation.

• Repair corrupted hard disk via third-party software - AOMEI Partition Assistant provides "check partition", and "disk surface test" features to repair bad sectors and fix corrupted external hard drive.

The tool is capable of checking hard disk health status and errors and repairing damaged hard disk by formatting, rebuilding MBR, etc. And it has a very strong compatibility with bad hard disks and it can clone damaged hard disks.

• Another way is to fix corrupted hard drive using CMD - run CHKDSK and format commands can check and repair the bad sectors.

This tool repairs damaged drives by formatting, rebuilding... But it is not suitable for RAW drives and you don't need to spend more time and effort to master the command parameters.

Let's see how to use diskpart commands and the professional repair tool to fix corrupted hard disk.

How to Repair Corrupted Hard Disk with Diskpart

If your hard disk is corrupted, you can use the Windows built-in tool –Diskpart to repair corrupted hard disk. Formatting is the most popular solution for users to repair the corrupted hard disk. And Diskpart can help you format your corrupted hard disk easily. The specific steps are as follows:

1. Press “Windows” + “R” to open the Run box, typing “diskpart” and press “Enter”.

2. And then, type the following command and press “Enter” after each.

• list disk
• select disk n(here “n” is the disk number of the disk you want to format.)
• clean
• create partition primary
• active
• select partition 1
• format fs=ntfs (If you want to format the disk into other file system like FAT32, replace the command with “format fs=fat32”.)

After that, the corrupted hard disk can be forcefully formatted in a few minutes.

If it doesn’t work after you do the operation above, you can also use the built-in CHKDSK to check the disk error: CHKDSK repair command: chkdsk D: /f

How to Repair corrupted hard disk via third-party software

If you don’t want to use command prompt to do this operation, you can turn to a third-party free corrupted hard disk repair tool AOMEI Partition Assistant. It provides easy-to-use disk partition management. And it is perfectly compatible with the current mainstream operating system like Windows 10/8/7. See the steps below:

Step 1. Download, install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the partition of the corrupted hard disk and choose “Check Partition” under “Advanced” tab. 

Step 2. In the pop-up window, select the way of checking errors to perform and click “OK”.

Finally, wait for the process to finish. 

Why hard disk corrupted?

“I have an old hard disk, just from a few years ago, which worked perfectly until now. Recently, I try to open it but find it not accessible. It has got corrupted? Is there anything I can do instead of going to a professional repair center? Thanks in advance.” - from Reddit

If all of a sudden your hard disk does not accessible, you know there is something wrong with the hard disk. What cause corrupted hard disk? The main causes of hard disk damage can be summarized as follows:

1. Abnormally cut off the power supply for the hard disk. (eg: suddenly power off when powering on and off.)

2. Wrong partition operation.

3. Dangerous habits during the Windows initialization and use. (If the users load too many things in the startup group, the initialization of Windows will take a lot of time, and it may cause a crash.)

4. Damage caused by related inferior accessories. (If the user buys a poor quality data cable, a poor quality power supply or a poor quality motherboard will cause damage to the hard disk. Therefore, users are advised to choose a good brand with good reputation when selecting accessories.)

Summary

Follow these simple steps, you can easily and effectively repair the corrupted hard disk. AOMEI Partition Assistant is such a useful corrupted hard disk repair tool. Besides check partition, it also provides you many other powerful functions such as Resize/Delete/Format Partition, repair MBR and so on. What’s more, AOMEI Partition Assistant can also help you torepair corrupted MBR too. In order to keep the data safe, you’d better back up your data regularly. If you want to do partition alignment, you can upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional to do this operation.