{"id":1342,"date":"2015-03-21T21:47:59","date_gmt":"2015-03-22T02:47:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/?p=1342"},"modified":"2016-05-11T17:58:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T22:58:39","slug":"what-is-a-bad-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/what-is-a-bad-sector\/","title":{"rendered":"What is a “Bad Sector”"},"content":{"rendered":"

A “Bad Sector” is a term for a broken piece of Hard Disk Drive (HDD)–a very small piece. There are millions of sectors<\/em> on a hard drive. EG, standard sector size is 512 bytes (aka 512B). Consider a typical disk (in 2015) of 1TB in size, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (1 trillion bytes). Doing some math: there are 2 million sectors on a 1TB hard drive.<\/p>\n

That means everything you store on there is broken up into pieces of 512. Have a 100MB video file? It is stored as 2000 pieces of 512B each.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, when sectors go bad, two mechanisms exist to help you.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The hard disk drive itself detects many bad sectors and remaps<\/em> them so that data is stored elsewhere, in good sectors. You may never notice these.<\/li>\n
  2. Windows Operating System detects bad sectors and marks them to avoid using them in the future. Windows Vista, 7, 8 (and presumably 10 and later) detect when a “chkdsk<\/a>” is necessary and prompt you to run it at next boot. If not, you can run “chkdsk<\/a>” yourself.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Note: when the OS detects hard disk errors, you should IMMEDIATELY MAKE A BACKUP. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200.<\/p>\n

    Then, get a new hard drive.<\/p>\n

    Usually things will only get worse. In the upcoming months, even days, even hours.<\/p>\n

    \n

    Why do sectors go bad<\/a>?<\/p>\n

    \n

    Reference: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Disk_sector<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A “Bad Sector” is a term for a broken piece of Hard Disk Drive (HDD)–a very small piece. There are millions of sectors on a hard drive. EG, standard sector size is 512 bytes (aka 512B). Consider a typical disk … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1357,"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions\/1357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montgomeryminds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}