Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology or S.M.A.R.T. Fortunately, this requirement is fulfilled by most applications in this space.
Any disk repair software you use must be able to work with all versions of both NTFS and FAT file systems. USB drives and some legacy systems still use various iterations of the FAT file system, though you will mostly encounter only FAT32. NTFS is the modern standard in most Windows devices. If you use a variety of external storage media and USB drives, your data might be organized under different file systems.
Simply analyzing the hard disk to determine its health and data distribution can be considered a part of disk repair too, as they help you decide how to best approach the problem. Some tools focus just on fixing the MBR, which can help you if your drive just isn’t booting. Occasionally this problem affects the Master Boot Record itself, preventing the OS from booting at all.ĭisk repair, therefore, primarily involves fixing bad sectors and recovering data from them. This can show the drive as empty even though it is not. Sometimes the file system table gets corrupted. Normally, the OS should remap the data to a new sector, but it does not always work, leading to data loss. When a hard disk starts malfunctioning, it rarely goes kaput all at once. NTFS or FAT, all file systems work by writing the organization information into a dedicated table. Keeping track of which sectors holds which data is the job of the file system. Each sector stores a chunk of data, with larger files spread across multiple sectors. Just like a geographical area is divided into smaller sectors, the storage area of a drive is split into logical sectors.
Hard disk drives work on the principle of sectors. What exactly do we mean when we say ‘disk repair’?