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I have a drive that is going bad. chkdsk /r fails to repair the sectors. It gets stuck at 16% for hours upon boot, and finally gives a blue screen saying I have to use recovery media. However, it will shut itself off and when turned on again, Windows does boot. It is just slow. I ran Western Digital diagnostics

https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx#WD_softwarepc

And the SMART status shows 100% OK, the quick test passed, but the extended test failed. It offered to 'repair' the bad sector by writing 000's to it, but said it is a destructive action and I should back up. It didn't tell me which file would have been clobbered!

I do have backups and I do have another drive on the way, but I want to possibly fix the bad sectors on this disk. How do I recover bad sectors on my disk drive in Windows 8.1?

This question is similar, but it didn't answer my question.

I want to make another full backup to a local external hard disk so it will be faster to restore compared to a cloud backup. However, I want to ensure that all the data is accessible.

Even if it is not possible to read the bad sectors, is there a way to find out which files are stored in the bad sectors? Then I can just delete the files, mark the sectors bad, restore only those files, then backup the whole drive locally.

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  • If you're only going to delete the files that are contained in the bad sectors, you're running the risk of file corruption at a later stage, and also a possibility of missing out on any files. Since you already have a backup as mentioned, why don't you just go ahead with the operation?
    – ValarMorghulis
    Commented Oct 31, 2017 at 7:13
  • Because it takes days to download the backup! I want to make a local backup with fresh data.
    – Chloe
    Commented Oct 31, 2017 at 7:20
  • Then the question might need to be re-worded to reflect the same. As it stands, there are ways to repair bad sectors, but your requirements are that either 1. You should know which files might get affected or 2. You should know a way to reduce the time it takes to backup your data. The fact that you're going to repair the bad sectors is a given.
    – ValarMorghulis
    Commented Oct 31, 2017 at 10:07

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