Best Solution for Repairing Bad Sectors on an External Hard Drive

Problem: External Hard Drive Has Bad Sectors & Needs to Be Formatted
I have a Maxtor 500GB external hard drive but there is something wrong with this drive recently. When I insert the external hard drive to the PC, Windows always says the disk drive needs to be formatted before I can use it. But I can’t format it since I have important data inside the external hard drive. I used some software to check the external hard drive and it showed there are some bad sectors on the external hard drive. So I want to know if there is a way that I can repair the bad sectors on my external hard drive without losing the important data.

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Solution for External Hard Drive Not Format Recovery

There is one thing you should be clear that you can’t repair the bad sectors on an external hard drive by formatting. However, low level format provides a solution to check and hide the bad sectors with which way your data won’t store to the bad sectors next time. If your data has been lost, you can only restore the data with data recovery software. It allows you to free recover any lost data from the external hard drive when it shows not formatted error, bad sectors or other similar kinds of error messages. You should know that data recovery software is not a repair tool so it can’t help you fix the bad sectors on the external hard drive.

Wizard to Extract Data from External Hard Drive

Firstly, choose the data recovery software. The disadvantage of the software is that you can’t use it until you install it to your computer. So after you installing the software on your computer, you can run the program and choose one recovery option. 

Secondly, choose the external hard drive so that it will be scanned by the data recovery software.

Thirdly, the scan will be finished soon. Once the scan is accomplished, you can preview the found files to decide if you want to recover them.

Finally, there is no problem with those found files? Then you can choose all files or only select the files you need to recover them. When you recover those selected files, you have to choose a path folder to save them. You had better not choose the original external hard drive as the storage media to store the recovered files.

Information about Bad Sectors

As external hard disk is a magnetized medium for data storage, there may be some problem with the external hard drive due to long-time use or other reasons. That is what we often says – bad sectors. A bad sector is also known as bad block. The reasons why external hard drive has bad sectors may include two aspects. First, the external hard is physically damaged due to long-time use. If so, you can only buy a new external hard drive and the data inside the original external will get lost. The other aspect may be that you unplug the external hard drive unsafely, or the external drive has been infected with virus or other unknown reasons. If so you can recover the lost data and format the external hard drive to make it usable again.

References

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