What is bad sector

Bad sector is an area on a computer's disk drive or flash memory that cannot be used to store data due to permanent damage, such as physical damage to the disk surface or failed flash memory transistors. It's not unusual for a hard disk to leave the manufacturing process with a damaged sector, but this does not affect the overall performance of the disk as the damaged space is considered unusable.

A bad sector cannot be repaired, but it can be marked as unusable. Once marked as unusable, the Operating System will know not to attempt to store data in that bad sector. The storage capacity of the disk will be decreased by the amount of storage space in the bad sector.

Wondershare Data Recovery can recover office documents lost due to bad sectors.

See also: Disk Sector