There are various causes for "bad sectors" on a hard drive. To find the reason, I'd suggest the following in the order I set them down. Using online scanners should be your first step in identifying and fixing the problem. There are several and they're free. I recommend using 4 or 5 of them as one might pick up something others miss.

Malware: Use a few online scanners to see if you have an infection. If you do, the solution is to clear it. Then do a chkdsk /f /r (right click on the cmd.exe and choose 'Run as Administrator') .

If that doesn't find the problem or if you're clean, and there are no mechanical/hardware problems your problem should be solved.

Improper shutdown of Windows. Best repair? chkdsk /f /r from the cmd prompt (run as Administrator).

Defects of the hard disk, including general surface wear, pollution of the air inside the unit, or the head touching the surface of the disk and other poor quality or aging hardware, including a bad processor fan, dodgy data cables, an overheated hard drive. In this case, the only real repair is identifying and fixing/replacing defective equipment.

If the problem was malware, then after the repair, you might have to restore various services/settings on your computer as cleaning the malware alone won't do that. There are various utilities which can do this. Search ghacks.net for reviews of some.

BACKUP YOUR DATA FIRST!

All hard disk drives have defective sectors out of factory.... but normally those are invisible to the end user.

The drive electronic remappes such sectors internally and neither the operating system nor the end user does notice this in any way. 

Data is remapped to a special area of the disk. Only when that area is full.... the operating system does report a bad sector.

This area is comparable small..... but normally still large enough to survive years of operating without ever triggering a bad sector event to the OS. Many hard disk die without ever triggering such an error to the OS.

So when you have a bad sector report, it most likely means that the Hard Disk Drive has experienced significant wear and a failure may be imminent.

Dont run any more repair tools until you have done a backup of any important data on the drive.

A hard drive with bad sectors may continue to run for years..... but may just as well die within the hour.

When your data is secured, you can try chkdsk /b on the drive in question.... it does attempt to repair bad sectors..... if possible of course.

Any software related issues should be solved by running that.

Otherwise hardware failure is the most likely outcome, sooner or later.

Hope that helps.

Backing up data/programs is always a good idea.

Before doing that though, I would definitely advise doing the anti malware screening.

After all, you would want a "clean" backup.

If anyone is interested, Quick Disaster Recovery is an excellent services app (portable) is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/qdr/?source=dlp

An excellent review: http://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/11/quick-disaster-recovery-restores-windows-functionality-after-attacks/?_m=3n%2e0038%2e938%2ehj0ao01hy5%2eysj

Wish I had done that. My local PC repair shop guy said that there are some security companies that could save my data, but it would be very costly. They could do nothing for me.

Easeus Data Recovery couldn't save anything. The PC couldn't even see the drive. I would get the dreaded "You Must Format This Drive Before You Can Use It" message, and when I tried, up came the "Windows Cannot Format The Drive) message...lol.

Good side is that this prompted me to get a new drive and I found a Toshiba 2 TB external for $79.00.

Backup, backup, backup......

I have a local partner that has the equipment to do physical drive recovery (disassemble the drive, pull data directly from the platters), and it's not cheap.  Usually starting around $400 and goes up depending on the type of work needed for recovery.  Not bad considering the national services start around $2000 and go up from there..

http://www.dposoft.net/hdd.html

It really worked for me.

Oh, and good luck.

Pulling that off generally requires not just the same model, but the same production batch. There can be variations from batch to batch that don't merit a change in model number. Better to just use RAID redundancy from the start...

Yes, kryo ...that was the concensus....you had to be lucky to strike 2 ICs that would access the disk exactly the same and therefore retrieve the data.

The ONLY true cure is prevention.  Always have a backup process in place...and preferably a redundancy one too....ie. a backup of the backup ....total physical drive requirement = 3. ....

This is actually an incorrect statement. There are various reasons for file system errors, but the term "bad sector" is reserved for a portion of the disk that has permanently lost its capability to store and retrieve data, see the following definition:

A bad sector is a sector on a computer's disk or flash memory 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.

Therefore, while you may be able to repair file system errors via various in-build mechanisms (mirror RAID, journals, checksums, fsck, checkdisk, etc.), it is by definition impossible to "remove" bad sectors.

If you care about your data, make regular backups. There is no way around it. There are various techniques used to improve the robustness of your data storage, either buy local or remote mirroring, etc., but even the most robust storage system may fail as a whole and then it's time to reach for your backups.

You demonstrated infact that DrJBHL is correct and your 'actually' statement was not ....