Hw to find which files are affected by a bad sector?

How do you identify the files?

a. O&O defrag comes to mind - it has a cluster inspector tool which lets you explore the disk at cluster level as I recall.

b. Have a look at this:
Finding out which file is affected by a bad sector – Home of JPEG-Repair Toolkit | Photo Repair Service | File Recovery

I commend Hard Disk Sentinel, but you need the Pro (licensed) version. I don't know if the trial will help here.

c. You might also try a recovery program such as Recuva. That scans a disk in normal or deep scan mode. When attempting to recover deleted and partially over-written files it gives an indication of the likely success of recovery. I don't know if it would give an indication in this context as the files haven't actually been deleted.

I was going to suggest Sysinternals DiskView https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...loads/diskview which I have used (briefly) before, but it is slightly annoying: you pick a cluster (not sector) from a graphical display (grid), and it tells you the file - but there is no way to specify the cluster number - you either have to count (!) from the top, or guess a position in the display, see where you landed and (probably) try again - a right pain.

As I have a copy of HD Sentinel, I gave it a try, but it turns out its not the Pro vn. But on the page that Dalchina linked is a suggestion (about half-way down) to use MS own tool, NFI.exe. The provided link is dead (MS are good at that), but a quick search found this page windows - How do I find if there are files at a specific bad sector? - Super User which points to somewhere NFI can be found (I won't include the link here just in case) - but I downloaded it, and it runs (in an admin cmd window).

It is simple to use: NFI X: <sector>

and returns the file name (if any). To see if it matched the arbitrary clusters I had picked with DiskView, I did a check - and in so doing, had to convert sectors to clusters. Its not as if that is difficult, but I had a right job confirming my (default for NTFS) cluster size of 4kB = 4096B = 8 x 512-B sectors (I worked it out myself, but wanted confirmation). In the end, HD sentinel told me, but many other disk utilities failed to do so. But in going back to grab the link to that superuser web page, I read a bit further and saw that the built-in fsutil windows utility can do a better job (also needs an admin cmd prompt):

fsutil volume querycluster X: <cluster>

so you will have to convert your iffy sector numbers to logical clusters - sorry!

Update: It turns out that my copy of HD Sentinel can do the job: start a disk surface test, but hit 'View' instead of 'Start test', and it opens a grid of the disk, and hovering the mouse over it shows the sector numbers - click one cell, and it shows the contents as a Hex view:

here I just show the top of the large window. But at the bottom is a selector:

which when clicked, shows the associated file.

So yet another way to skin the cat!

Update 2: The page linked by Dalchina about HD Sentinal warns about the risks of trying to read the damaged sector(s), and also mentions that fsutil command in a long comment by 'Gabriel'.