![]() If you find one or two bad sectors on the drive, we suggest scanning the drive a second time about a month after the first scan and compare if the bad secort count remained the same or increased. What you don’t want, is an increasing number of bad sectors over time. If a drive has a bad sector it’s not the end of the world and means the USB stick should be thrown away (preferably e-recycled). Once done, Windows will generate a report for you to determine if the USB flash drive should be used or discarded. The process will take a few seconds up to several minutes based on the GB capacity of your flash drive. The /x parameter unmounts any “handles” to the drive or said another way, this step will not allow any other resource to access the flash drive during the scan.The /r parameter tells Windows to repair/restore bad sectors (if possible).The /f parameter tells CHKDSK to fix any errors it finds.NOTE: *The letter d represents the drive letter of the flash drive. Once inside the command line utility type chkdsk d: /f /r /x and click Enter. If not, click Cancel and backup your files. If you have created a backup for important data, click OK button. Youll receive a warning that asks to back up data first. In the Explorer window type cmd and press enter Click Repair button if you want to repair bad sectors on the 'Bad Track Verification' window. Using Windows Explorer navigate to the drive letter In our opinion, run the check disk one time to see if your issue is resolved, but if subsequent scans are required, we recommend discarding the flash drive to avoid further issues. A disk read error occurs during operation.Some signs of a bad sector on a flash drive include: This same utility will also flag any hard bad sectors not to be used again, and of course not repaired. The soft bad sectors can be fixed by using the CHKDSK utility in the Windows operating system. In lower quality flash drives, it is possible the incorrect firmware was written into the USB controller ROM and thus creates instability via soft bad sectors.īad sectors cannot be repaired however soft bad sectors can be repaired. A soft bad sector can occur from a software or data error during the write process. A good example: leaving a flash drive in your pocket and it went through the wash, or the device was dropped and hit the ground is such a way, physical damage happened to the memory.Ī soft bad sector on a flash drive are memory logic problems. A hard bad sector cannot be repaired or fixed and is typically induced from physical abuse. Physical damage to a USB flash drive will create a hard bad sector. ![]() A bad sector on a flash drive sounds easy enough to diagnose, but it’s important to know there are two types of bad sectors: hard and soft. The instructions below will also fix any bad sectors, if possible, during the scanning process.Ī bad sector on a flash drive is a portion of memory on the flash drive which cannot be accessed, written to, or read from and therefore cannot be used. This how to tutorial describes a simple way to check for bad sectors on a USB flash drive.
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