If a hard drive's head touches the rotating plater, that area will be damaged. Physical / hard bad sectors are a cluster of sectors of the hard drive that are physically damaged.

There are two types of bad sectors – physical (hard) and logical (soft) bad sector. In fact, it is very common that disk used for a long time has bad sectors. These phenomena show that there must be bad sectors on the disk. Something weird will happen if the hard disk has bad sectors, for instance, operating system cannot boot normally hard disk can't be formatted when you open a file, error is reported.

Guide #2: How to repair bad sectors using free bad sector repair tool?Ī bad sector is a sector on a hard disk that cannot be used due to permanent damage (or an OS inability to successfully access it), such as physical damage to the disk surface (or sometimes sectors being stuck in a magnetic or digital state that cannot be reversed) or failed flash memory transistors.

Guide #1: How to check bad sectors for hard drive or USB drive?.

Free software to check and repair bad sectors.

So, DBAN is definitely data destruction utility to wipe or destruct your hard drive data permanently specially you want to sell your old computer or want a fresh installation of OS after a serious virus or spyware attack.

Hit Enter to start booting the DBAN Interface Mode. Then a DOS screen will be loading as below. Burn DBAN ISO Images with CD DVD burning software.ģ, Once finish burning, insert bootable wipe hard drive CD into CD ROM or DVD ROM and boot the computer by loading CD ROM media first.Ĥ. Meanwhile, DBAN is erase data files until data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by overwriting the data with random numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC (a PRNG). To wipe out the whole data type “autonuke” When it loads, or hit Enter key at startup to get option for deleting specific hard drives or partitions. Once boot up BDAN, you’re able to wipe out the whole hard disk contents or can select specific hard drives or partitions for deleting (shredding). This bootable wipe hard drive CD can be booted from a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive and supports various hard disk format such as PATA (IDE), SCSI and SATA hard drives exists for Intel x86 and PowerPC systems.

DBAN (Darik Boot And Nuke), a bootable Wipe Hard Drive CD that allow you allow you to destructively wipe / delete / erase a disk (floppy disks, hard disks, etc), or a partition that it sees on a system, making it very useful for unattended data destruction scenarios.

Bootable hard drive repair software