How to Test Bad Sectors on Hard Drive or SSD [3 Methods]

How to test my hard drive for bad sectors?

What are bad sectors?

Bad sector refers to the permanently damaged area in the hard drive, it is caused by the reasons like the wrong shutdown method of the PC, dust pollution, virus attack, etc. All data on bad sectors will be lost and you can not store data on it.

Bad sectors include physical bad sectors and logical bad sectors. Physical bad sectors are physically damaged storage clusters on a hard drive; while logical bad sectors refer to storage clusters on the hard drive that can not function properly.

Typically, you can test bad sectors on hard drive when you are encountering the following condition:

☎ The computer often makes abnormal noises. ☎ Blue screen. ☎ A "Files are corrupted" message appears when opening the files. ☎ The Windows system crashes. ☎ The temperature of the hard drive is too high. ☎ Disk boot failure. ☎ Computer freezes. ☎ The computer is prohibited from accessing the data.

When there're excessive bad sectors, the hard drive will crash completely. Therefore, it's quiet necessary to know how to check bad sector in hard disk and repair them.

How to test bad sector in HDD & SSD

To keep the hard disk in a healthy state, you need to perform SSD/HDD bad sector scan in time. Here, you will learn about two bad sectors testing methods.

● Method 1. Check bad sectors with Command Prompt

Command Prompt can not only do basic disk management tasks, but also scan and repair bad sectors on the hard disk. Please refer to the following steps.

Step 1. Click "Start" button and type "cmd" in the task bar, then select "Run as administrator". Type "chkdsk/?" and press "Enter" to list all drives on your PC.

Step 2. Type "chkdsk g:" to test the G drive (you can replace "g" with another drive letter). If you want to repair the errors on the hard drive, you can type "chkdsk g: /f" and press "Enter".

Step 3. You will receive a notice when the target drive is on work: "Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)". Type "Y" to accept it.

● Method 2. Test bad sectors on Partition Properties

In Windows system, besides CMD, you can also use Partition Properties to test your hard drive.

Tip: If the target hard drive is already opened, you will not be able to check the bad sectors on it immediately.

Step 1. Open "This PC" and right-click on the target drive, then click "Properties".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, click "Tools" and "Check" in turn. Choose "Automatically fix file system errors" or "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors", then click "Start".

How to effectively test and repair bad sectors on hard drive

Although Command Prompt is a practical method, you need to master the commands of check disk proficiently. In order to avoid losses caused by inputting wrong commands, you can back up the data on the target hard drive in advance.

You can also try a easier bad sectors repair tool - AOMEI Partition Assistant. It can not only help you check the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard disk for free, but also effectively test bad sectors on hard drive and repair them.

In addition, you can also manage your hard drive through this comprehensive tool, because it also provides many functions, such as clone data disk, format disk partition, wipe the whole hard drive, etc.

▶ Perform surface test

When you don’t know whether there are bad sectors on the hard drive, you can use "Surface test" to quickly test the target drive.

Step 1. Click the "Test" menu, and select "Disk Surface Test".

Step 2. Tick the "Quick Check" option and click "Start". When the test is finished, you will visually see the errors on the hard drive, as the damaged part will be marked red.

▶ Check and remove bad sector

When the result of Surface Test shows that there are errors on the hard disk, the "Check partition" function can test and fix the bad sectors on it.

Step 1. In the main interface, right-click the target drive and then click "Check Partition".

Step 2. Choose the "Check partition and fix errors in this partition by using chkdsk.exe" option, then click "OK".

Step 3. Wait for a while and click "OK" when it's finished.

▶ Check Disk Health

After repairing bad sectors, you can also check the health condition of your hard drive with SMART test.

Step 1. Right-click the target drive, then select “Properties” and “Health(SMART)” to check the health situation.

Step 2. If you see "Health Status: Good", your hard drive is in a good condition. If the status is "Caution", you can still use it normally. When you see the following interface, you should clone the hard disk to another, preventing the data lose.

Step 3. Click "View details" to see more detailed information.

Further reading: What to do if there're excessive bad sectors on the hard drive

When there are too many bad sectors on the hard drive, you can migrate the whole disk to another hard drive. Please use "Disk Clone Wizard" to do it.

Step 1. Connect the new drive with your PC, click "Clone" and select "Clone Disk" in order.

Step 2. Click "Clone Disk Quickly" and "Next". 

Step 3. Select the source drive and click "Next".

Step 4. Choose the destination disk and tick "Optimize the performance of SSD", then click "Next".

Step 5. Edit the destination disk and then click "Next".

Step 6. Click "Apply" and "Proceed" to perform this operation.

Tip: You can enjoy other powerful functions, including Allocate free space, Move App to another drive, Migrate OS to SSD, etc.

Verdict

In this post, we shared 3 methods to test bad sectors on hard drive. Besides, we also provided reliable AOMEI Partition Assistant for you to test and repair your hard drive.

If you want to test bad sectors in the hard drive on Windows Server, you can try the Server Version.