A hard disk can have physical areas that become damaged and therefore corrupt data stored in those locations. A disk area that is damaged this way is typically reported as bad sectors on the disk. Even if the disk is physically okay, misbehaving device drivers, applications, or intermittent faults in the hardware itself can logically corrupt a file that is written to the disk.

The Check Disk utility detects bad sectors, attempts to fix errors in the file system, and scans for and attempts to recover bad sectors.

• Hard-drive errors can cause files to become corrupted, which may prevent you from running a program or opening a document. You can use Windows 7's Check Disk program to look for and fix hard-drive errors.
• Check Disk runs two different types of checks: a basic hard-drive check and a more thorough bad sector check. You should perform the basic check about once a week; perform the more thorough bad sector check once a month. A bad sector is one that through physical damage or some other cause can no longer be used to reliably store data.
  1. In the Computer folder, right-click the disk you want to clean and choose Properties from the menu that appears. The hard drive's Properties dialog box opens with the General tab displayed.
  2. Click the Tools tab.
  
  
  
  3. Press Check Now.
  4. The Check Disk dialog box appears. If you want Check Disk to fix any errors it fi nds, press Automatically Fix File System Errors.
  5. If you want Check Disk to look for bad sectors, check Scan For and Attempt Recovery of Bad Sectors.
  
  
  
  6. Press Start.
  7. Windows notifies you that it cannot check the disk while the disk is in use. Press Schedule Disk Check to run the check the next time you start your computer.
  
  
  
  8. Restart your computer by pressing the Start button, clicking the right arrow next to the Shut Down option, and choosing Restart. Before restarting your computer, Windows 7 runs the Disk Check utility.
• The chkdsk command-line utility is also available for use at the command prompt or from within a script. Read more about chkdsk at:
  http://www.w7forums.com/use-chkdsk-check-disk-t448.html.

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