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TestDisk is a free and open-source data recovery utility that helps users recover lost partitions or repair corrupted filesystems. [1] TestDisk can collect detailed information about a corrupted drive, which can then be sent to a technician for further analysis.
A bad sector in computing is a disk sector on a disk storage unit that is unreadable. Upon taking damage, all information stored on that sector is lost. When a bad sector is found and marked, the operating system like Windows or Linux will skip it in the future. Bad sectors are a threat to information security in the sense of data remanence.
[10] On Windows NT operating systems, CHKDSK can also check the disk surface for bad sectors and mark them (in MS-DOS 6.x and Windows 9x, this is a task done by Microsoft ScanDisk). The Windows Server version of CHKDSK is RAID-aware and can fully recover data in bad sectors of a disk in a RAID-1 or RAID-5 array if other disks in the set are ...
The software can also be used to generate and sometimes repair bad sectors. Recent versions include support for DCO restore and freeze operations, HPA security (password) operations and simulated bad sectors. [2] ATATool is no longer available for personal download and can only be used for "professional users" like for security researchers. [3]
SpinRite was originally written as a hard drive interleave tool. [3] At the time SpinRite was designed, hard drives often had a defect list printed on the nameplate, listing known bad sectors discovered at the factory.
On the Windows platform, many programs designed to monitor and report S.M.A.R.T. information will function only under an administrator account. BIOS and Windows (Windows Vista and later) may detect S.M.A.R.T. status of hard disk drives and solid state drives, and give a prompt if the S.M.A.R.T. status is bad. [25]
The most common data recovery scenarios involve an operating system failure, malfunction of a storage device, logical failure of storage devices, accidental damage or deletion, etc. (typically, on a single-drive, single-partition, single-OS system), in which case the ultimate goal is simply to copy all important files from the damaged media to another new drive.
A rising number of bad sectors can be a sign of a failing hard drive, but because the hard drive automatically adds them to its own growth defect table, [4] they may not become evident to utilities such as ScanDisk unless the utility can catch them before the hard drive's defect management system does, or the backup sectors held in reserve by ...