Are you unable
to access a part of the data or the entire file from your hard drive?
If yes, then it may be because of the corrupted HDD sectors and we
call these corrupted/damaged sectors as Bad sectors. Bad
sectors are that portions of the hard drive that becomes unusable for
storage purpose due to any permanent damage. The damage can be both
logical as well as physical.
We cannot repair a bad sector but it
can be marked as unusable by OS and then it will not use these marked
sectors for data storing purposes. If you had previously stored data
on volume whose sectors have gone corrupted or damaged, then
possibility of accessing the data becomes very negligible. Although
many data recovery software claims to regain data even from a hard
drive having bad sectors.
Following reasons
can be summarised for the creation of Bad sectors:
- If Mac OS was not properly shut down then it can lead to creation of bad sectors on hard drive.
- Virus and Malwares can also be responsible for creating bad sectors. Viruses and malwares can corrupts and damage the data and the sectors in HDD.
- Physical damage in hard drive can also be the cause behind the bad sectors.
- Bad sectors can also be created because of hardware problems like a bad quality processor fan, faulted data cables, etc.
Types of bad sectors:
Hard bad sector:
Hard bad sectors can occur because of the physical damage on the hard drive. If read/write head comes in contact with the physical portion of the drive than it can lead to damage of the head and thus can results in creation of bad sectors. If the hard drive gets exposed to extreme environment conditions or it has faulty mechanical parts then bad sectors will be created.
Hard bad sectors can occur because of the physical damage on the hard drive. If read/write head comes in contact with the physical portion of the drive than it can lead to damage of the head and thus can results in creation of bad sectors. If the hard drive gets exposed to extreme environment conditions or it has faulty mechanical parts then bad sectors will be created.
Soft bad sector:
These type of
bad sector creates whenever the error correction code on a sector
mismatches with the content of the same sector. This can occur due to
some logical error or error caused by viruses. This error has no
relation with the physical error.
Recovery of data from bad sectors is very difficult but some third-party data recovery
softwares can recover partially from bad sectors. No tool can recover
100% data from the bad sectors but recovery may be done to some
extent only. I personally suggest to use Stellar Phoenix Mac Data
Recovery for recovering data from drive having bad sectors. This tool
will recover all data from good sectors and partially from the bad
sectors too.