How To Repair A Corrupted Hard Drive And Fix My Storage Disk

When it comes to the word corrupt, it’s mostly associated with pen drives, SD Cards, and some special category of humans. There is another breed of storage devices called hard drive which is more sturdy, and it doesn’t run into problems as often as flash drives. But hard drives don’t last forever, they tend to get corrupted, and we have to find ways to repair corrupted hard drives. Instead of contacting some hard drive recovery service, you can try some workarounds on your own and use this guide.

Now, your HDD might get corrupt in two ways: the problem might occur at the software level which can be fixed. But if the hardware is at the fault, you might not be able to get it back to normal and restore the corrupted hard drive. The only possible way out of this situation is to recover the data before the hard drive sleeps forever.

How to fix/repair a corrupted hard drive in Windows 10?

If the hard drive you’re trying fix contains your important data, then you should use a data recovery software to extract the photos, music, videos, and other files before they’re gone forever.

ALSO READ: How Can I Recover Data from a Dead or Erased Hard Drive

Now, in order to fix a hard disk drive that’s gone rogue, we should start with the basics because we have to make sure that the hard drive is corrupt or not in the first place.

It might be possible the problem was nothing but a loose screw, and we repaired the whole bicycle. Here are some ways which might help you repair a corrupted hard drive.

Check the power supply

If you’re using an external hard drive, then it’s possible that the storage media is taking the power from the USB port itself. Try to unplug the hard drive and connect it again in the process of hard drive fix. You can also try another USB port on your computer, maybe the one you’re using isn’t working properly. Make sure haven’t disabled your USB ports.

Some external hard drive comes with a separate power supply, so, do a check if the same is working properly. Checking the power supply in the case of an internal hard drive might be a little tougher. However, if your PC is detecting the internal drive, there is hardly any chance something is wrong with the power.

Try the hard drive on another PC, if your PC can’t detect it

It might be possible that only your PC can’t read the hard drive and you need to repair hard drive accordingly. Connect the storage media to another PC, maybe you get a sense of relief by seeing it work on another PC.

If it works, then there might be some issue with the device drivers installed on your computer that needs to be fixed. You can reinstall your hard drive’s drivers by visiting This PC (right-click) > Manage > Device Manager. Right-click on the name of your hard drive and click Uninstall. Now, restart the computer and connect the hard drive. The drivers will start installing automatically in most cases.

You can also consider changing the drive letter assigned to the storage media to restore the corrupted hard drive. Go to This PC (right-click) > Manage > Disk Management. Right-click your hard drive and click Change Drive Letter and Paths…

Now, click on the drive letter and click Change. Select the new drive letter and click Ok. It’ll show a warning that other programs might not work, click Yes. Problems will only occur if you change the letter of an internal drive where you have installed apps, mostly the Windows drive.

Check your hard drive for errors

Windows has an inbuilt mechanism for hard disk recovery using which you can check a storage media, internal or external HDD, for errors. In various cases, Windows will automatically ask you to scan the drives when you connect it to the machine. If it doesn’t happen, you can visit This PC > Drive (right-click) > Properties > Tools tab. Click Check.

The hard drive we use on our desktops and laptops have a built-in hardware monitoring technology called S.M.A.R.T. Now, Windows doesn’t have any app to display the data collected by S.M.A.R.T. but you can check the overall status using WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) in CMD and try your hands on the broken hard disk repair.

1. Open CMD in admin mode.
2. Type wmic and press enter.
3. type diskdrive get status and press Enter.

It’ll show the SMART status of your hard drive as OK, this means everything is fine. But if it’s not Ok then you should worry about your hard drive dying in the coming future. Things get confusing when you have multiple hard drives connected, it doesn’t display the name, so, you will see an ‘Ok’ for each of the hard drives connected.

ALSO READ: How To Recover Deleted Files From Hard Drive

Alternatively, you can fetch S.M.A.R.T. details using a utility known as CrystalDiskInfo. It can show you the numbers related to individual hard drive attributes, as well as, it’s overall health, temperature, the number of start counts, total number of active hours, etc.

How to fix a corrupt hard drive using built-in Windows CMD tools and other options?

The Check Disk utility we use for repairing corrupt flash drives and SD cards also works for rotating hard drives and SSDs. It can be accessed in the Properties of a connected hard drive. For hard drive recovery, you also use Check Disk or chkdsk using the command line.

1. To start the corrupted hard disk repair process, open Command Prompt in Admin mode (Right-click Start button and click Command Prompt (Admin)).
2. Type the following command to start the error checking and fixing process for your internal or external drive:
   chkdsk C: /F
   where C is the drive letter.
   You can add more options to the command to make the scan process more rigorous.
   chkdsk C: /F /X /R
   where
   /X If required, it forces the volume to dismount before the scan.
   /R Locates bad sectors and recovers readable data.
3. Press Enter. Press Y if the system asks you for a restart (in the case of internal drive).
4. Wait till the Check Disk utility repairs your hard drive for errors.

Chkdsk might not be a fool-proof solution but it works in many cases and might help you repair your external or internal HDD without formatting. If it fails, then you can consider the option of formatting your drive by visiting Windows Explorer.

A quick format would work but if you want you can go for the full format option. Just untick the Quick Format checkbox. Please note that this will take more time than normal, even hours in case of a hard drive that’s 1TB in size.

Format an external hard drive using CMD

You can access the Diskpart tool using command prompt in Windows to format an external hard drive that’s not working properly. The process to clean a hard drive is similar to how you format flash drives and SD cards.

1. Open CMD in Admin Mode.
2. Type diskpart and press Enter.
3. Type list disk to display all the storage media connected to your system.
4. Type select disk X where X is the number of the disk you want to format.
5. Type clean and press enter to erase all the data on the drive.
6. Now, you have to create a new partition on the drive. Type the following and press enter:
   create partition primary
7. Now format the newly created partition using the following command:
   format fs=ntfs
   It’ll take some time for the system to format the partition according to the file system specified. You can also use fat32 in place of NTFS but the latter is recommended for a hard drive repair with a larger capacity.
   Also, if you want to perform a quick format instead of full format, add a quick attribute to the command.
   format fs=ntfs quick
   You can add a name to the partition by adding the label attribute in the same command:
   format fs=ntfs quick label=MyDrive
8. After the format process completes, assign a letter to the drive:
   assign letter=G

Format an internal volume using Disk Management

Now, the corrupt hard drive you’re trying to format is an internal logical volume, then the Diskpart tool can easily help you out. Follow these steps to format an internal drive:

1. Right-click My Computer/This PC. Click Manage.
2. Click Disk Management in the left pane.
3. Now, right-click the local volume you want to erase.
4. Click Format.
5. In the window that pops-up, name the disk, select file system (mostly NTFS). Keep the allocation size to default.
6. Tick ‘Perform a quick format’ checkbox to make the format process faster. Untick it the volume is having issues.
7. Click Ok, and it will take a while to format the lock disk on your computer.