Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing/Bad hard drive

Reference desk/Computing frequently receives questions about how to repair a computer system that has a failing hard drive. Here is a list of recommendations.

Bad sectors reported
A sector is a subdivision of a track that stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data. Sectors can go bad and the data cannot be read. This can be caused by improper shutdown of the OS or internal drive defects cause by shock, drive overheating, bad PC hardware or aging drive hardware.

S.M.A.R.T. errors reported
S.M.A.R.T. is a monitoring system included in hard disk drives that detects and reports on various indicators of drive reliability, with the intent of enabling the anticipation of hardware failures.

In Windows, open a command prompt and type the following commands: wmic diskdrive get status

The display will show the status for each drive.

A better tool is CrystalDiskInfo.