If there are some bad sectors on your Western Digital HDD, you can try the free WD HDD bad sector repair tool or solutions in this post.
The bad sector means a tiny cluster of storage space that appears to be defective on the hard drive. When your Western Digital HDD has any bad sector, this sector cannot respond to read or write requests. Both the WD traditional mechanical hard drive (HDD) and modern solid-state drive (SSD) might develop bad sectors. The bad sectors can be caused by physical damage. In such a case, you can not repair them, just have to replace the bad hard drive with a good one.
However, you can apply some HDD bad sector repair tools to fix the bad sectors caused by some software errors. For example, when your computer suddenly shuts down because of a power failure and interrupts the process of writing data to a sector on the WD HDD, it might result in bad sectors. Besides, when the sectors containing data that does not match the error-correction code, there are chances that the sectors would be marked as bad sectors. Or the virus and malware could also lead to bad sectors.
To repair bad sectors on the WD hard drive, you can try the CHKDSK command to repair those bad sectors. But before that, it is wise to first recover any important data.
Step 1. Press the Windows key+ R key to open the “Run” dialogue. Type in ”cmd” and hit on “Enter”.
Step 2. Type chkdsk g: /f /r /x and hit Enter. (Replace g with the drive letter of your hard drive.)
This Chkdsk will attempt to fix soft bad sectors, and mark hard bad sectors so they won’t be used again. Every parameter means:
/f: Fixes errors on the disk.
/r: Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.
/x: Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary.
Besides launching the CKHDSK bad sector repair tool from CMD, you can also run it via the WD HDD bad sector repair tool: AOMEI Partition Assistant. With the user-friendly interface, both computer experts and newbies can easily apply it. Now you can free download it and check how it works.
Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the WD drive and choose “Advanced” > “Check Partition”.
Step 2. In the pop-up window, there are 3 ways for you to select to check and fix errors. Here we choose “Check partition and fix errors in this partition by using chkdsk.exe”.
Step 3. Then the AOMEI Partition Assistant will start to check and fix partition errors.
In addition to scanning each partition on WD HDD for bad sector repair, you can also use the “Surface Test” feature to scan the entire hard drive for errors.
Finally, we would like to share some advice that can help you prevent bad sectors from occurring again on the HDD or SSD. It is much better than looking for effective methods to repair them.
1. Pay attention to both hardware and the software on your PC. Buy high-quality hardware from respected brands.
2. You can run CHKDSK or the free WD HDD bad sector repair tool on your drive regularly.
3. Run the reliable anti-virus and anti-malware software regularly.
4. Apply a quality disk defragmenter program to help prevent head crashes (head crashes can create hard bad sectors). It can reduce hard drive wear and tear, thus prolonging its lifetime and preventing bad sectors.
5. Don't make your computer heat and dusty. Move it carefully every time.
6. Shut down the computer correctly. Make sure all running programs are closed before shutting down your PC.
7. Make sure the power supply is enough when you using a laptop for work.
So, in this article, we introduce the WD HDD bad sector repair tool and solution. Also you can get useful information on how to prevent bad sector development on the Western Digital hard drive in the future. The AOMEI Partition Assistant can do more than just repairing bad sectors, and it is also able to wipe Western Digital HDD, copy partition/disk, format large hard drive (2TB at most) to FAT32 file system and more.
You can also enjoy more advanced features like securely erasing SSD, allocating free space from one partition to another, converting MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, transferring OS between MBR and GPT disk, etc..