Bad Sector Repair on Windows 10 [3 Ways Included]

Bad sector is a sector on a computer's disk drive or flash memory that is either inaccessible or un-writeable due to physical damage to the disk surface or failed flash memory transistors. When you have a bad sector on the hard disk, the data on the bad sector may be lost.  Can bad disk sectors be repaired? Some people have similar questions:

"I have upgraded to Windows 10 and during creating an image of the hard drive to back up, Windows 10 reported that the back up had failed, the reason was bad sectors. Can someone tell me how to repair bad sector on Windows 10? The drive I am checking is the main system drive". - from Microsoft Community

Therefore, you need to do a bad sector repair on Windows 10 hard drive. You can use disk utility software such as CHKDSK, SCANDISK, Windows built-in bad sector repair tool, or best bad sector repair software to detect or repair bad sector.

How to fix bad sectors in Windows 10?

When bad sectors appear on a hard disk, it is important to choose a reliable and efficient bad sector repair tool. This article will provide three HDD bad sector repair tools free: including bad sector repair cmd and HDD bad sector repair tool.

AOMEI Partition Assistant: This tool provides bad sector cloning, partition checking and disk surface testing functions. In addition, it also provides more advanced repair functions, such as corrupted MBR, OS migration, and so on. It is also suitable for WD bad sector repair tool.

Does CHKDSK f fix bad sectors?: Of course.CHKDSK is a built-in command line tool provided by Windows that you can use to check the structural integrity of your hard disk and repair bad sectors. But this only works if you have only a few bad sectors on your drive! The command to fix bad sectors is chkdsk g: /f /r /x. let's learn to check for bad sectors Windows 10 cmd.

Keep reading and we will provide specific step-by-step instructions to solve your problem and permanently remove bad sectors from your hard disk using a bad sector repair tool. 

Bad sector checking on Windows 10/11 using AOMEI Partition Assistant

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a professional disk manager. The Check Partition feature can directly help you check the bad sectors from the hard disk on Windows 11/10/8/7 with several clicks. To check bad sector with AOMEI Partition Assistant, you can follow the steps below:

Step 1. Download AOMEI Partition Assistant and launch it. At the main interface, right-click the partition that you want to check and select Advanced, then select Check Partition.

Step 2. Select the way of checking errors to perform. As you can see from the following screenshot, there are three choices, simply choose the last one “Check whether there is bad sector on the partition”. And click OK to go to next step.

Step 3. Click Start button to check.

To check a disk, you can click the target disk and select Test > Disk Surface Test.

After finding out the bad sector, you can subdivide the bad sector into an independent unallocated space. In that case, it will not affect the data on the good sector, and the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in this bad sector. You can also use this tool to repair bad sectors Windows 11.

AOMEI Partition Assistant is also a disk copying software. When you find there are too many bad sectors, you may consider replacing the disk with a good one. You can use Copy Disk Quickly method to copy the data on the disk to a new disk, it will not copy the bad sector to the new disk.

Bad sector repair on Windows 10/11 using Windows built-in tool

Step 1. Open This PC, right-click on "System drive" and choose "Properties".

Step 2. Go to "Tools", and click "Check now". 

Step 3.  After that, it will pop up a window, check “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”. Click “Start” to complete these operations.

Step 4. Wait for the system to automatically repair it.

When it finished, the bad sectors are repaired. By the way, if you want to fix file system error at the same time, you also can check the option “Automatically fix file system errors”.

Tip: If you are reminded that it can't be repaired because the disk is using now (usually it's the system drive), you can choose to repair it automatically when you start your computer next time.

Run CHKDKS on Windows 10 or 11 for checking bad sector

CHKDKS command prompt is a free Windows built-in tool, and it can be used to check the integrity of a file system and bad sectors of a disk. And find and fix bad sectors, errors, or any other disk problems. Here are the specific steps of removing bad sectors from the hard disk via CMD:

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

2. Input “chkdsk g: /f /r /x” and press “Enter”. (Here, “g” is the drive letter of the disk you want to check.)

This option will run the CHKDSK to check and repair bad sectors or other disk errors on G: volume. The “/f” parameter tells CHKDSK to fix any errors it finds, “/r” tells it to locate the bad sectors on the drive and recover readable information, and “/x” forces the drive to dismount before the process starts.

Now you can see the information on the disk such as disk space parameters, file size, and the number of bad sectors. But you need to be careful when typing the parameters, any wrong parameters may cause data loss. AOMEI Partition Assistant can help you greatly in managing and repairing hard drives.