cgsecurity.org

Sometimes a so-called “logical bad sector”, caused by a sudden power loss during a write operation, can render a HDD inaccessible. The drive should still be fine physically, but that sector (or small group of sectors) which is in an inconsistent state has to be overwritten. I've had a situation once where someone asked me to recover data from a drive which had a similar issue, and make it usable again ; first I made a complete recovery image with ddrescue, then noticed that a single very small area couldn't be read at all, so I “surgically” overwrote that one small area with a custom made ddrescue command, and it was a success, afterwards it was working normally. But if you don't care about the data, it would be quicker to do a complete wipe / initialize / “low level format”, however you name it. If Windows fails to do it (sometimes a single inconsistent sector can make the whole system freeze), run a Linux live system on a USB drive or SD card and run a “dd” or “ddrescue” command with the drive as target and “/dev/zero” as source.