C Drive Corrupted on Windows 10: Causes, Fixes, and Data Protection

Symptoms of A Corrupted Hard Drive

It is easy to tell when a hard drive has become corrupted. Before we look at ways to repair a corrupted C drive on Windows 10, we must first understand what conditions may warn you that your C drive is damaged.

• Drive Is Inaccessible: When trying to access your hard drive, you will encounter a prompt stating that the drive is inaccessible. The same is true of any shortcuts you point to files on that drive.
• Drive Needs to Be Formatted: When you connect or try to access your drive, the operating system tells you that it needs to be formatted before you can use it. This is an immediate indicator that the drive is logically corrupted and that its file system is corrupted or RAW.
• Blue Screen of Death (BSOD): If the drive containing the operating system files is corrupted, you may receive the infamous Blue Screen of Death problem indicating that your drive is compromised.
• Bad Sectors: Bad sectors are areas of the hard drive that can no longer be used. The data stored in these sectors is likely to be corrupted. Bad sectors can be found by analyzing S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data (more on this later).
• Slow performance: A damaged drive runs at a slower speed and may experience difficulties with even the simplest tasks, such as opening folders or transferring data from a device.
• Disappearing files: Corruption can cause some areas of the drive to become inaccessible, meaning that a large chunk of your files may suddenly disappear. While they may still physically exist on the hard drive, when it is corrupted, they cannot be accessed.

Causes of C Drive Corrupted in Windows 10

Sometimes, your internal hard drive or external hard drive can become corrupted and become unrecognized or inaccessible in Windows 10/8/7. Generally, the issue that the Windows 10 C drive is corrupted can be caused by a variety of factors, including hardware failure, software conflicts, viruses, and malware.

Hardware failures can occur when a hard drive is damaged or fails, or when the computer's power supply does not work properly. Software conflicts occur when two or more programs try to access the same files or resources, or when a program is incompatible with the operating system. Viruses and malware can also cause C drive corruption because they can corrupt or delete important system files.

How to Fix C Drive Corrupted and Unreadable in Windows 10

Once the hard drive is damaged, you may not be able to access the data in it. This will cause a great hindrance to your daily work. Therefore, you need to repair the damaged hard drive as soon as possible.

Tips: The repair solutions mentioned in the following part may lose the data on the hard disk, you can make a backup of your important files in advance.

Method 1. Fix File System Errors

Hard drives are prone to corruption if they have bad sectors or internal errors. If you know how to run Disk Check on your computer, it will easily fix the hard drive corruption for you.

1. Press “Windows + E” to open File Explorer and right-click on the corrupted drive from the left pane and select “Properties”.
2. Select the “Tools” tab and click the Check button in the Error Check section. Then click on “Scan and repair drive”.

3. When the scan finishes repairing the drive errors, click Repair this drive.

Method 2. Repairing A Corrupted Hard Drive with Diskpart Command

If your C drive is corrupted on Windows 10, you can use the Windows built-in tool - Diskpart to repair the corrupted hard drive. Formatting is the most popular solution for users to repair a corrupted hard drive. And Diskpart can help you to format your corrupted hard drive easily. The specific steps are as follows.

1. Press “Windows + R” to open the Run box, typing “diskpart” and press “Enter”.
2. And then, type the following command and press “Enter” after each.

• list disk
• select disk n (here “n” is the disk number of the disk you want to format.)
• clean
• create partition primary
• active
• select partition 1
• format fs=ntfs (If you want to format the disk into other file system like FAT32, replace the command with “format fs=fat32”.)

Further Reading: Back Up Your Hard Drive Before It Corrupts

Data protection is essential for any computer user, and AOMEI Backupper is a great tool for protecting your data in the event of C Drive corruption in Windows 10. AOMEI Backupper allows users to easily create backups of their system and data, and restore them in the event of a system failure. It also provides advanced features such as incremental and differential backups, which allow users to save time and storage space. With AOMEI Backupper, users can rest assured that their data is safe and secure.

It enables you to back up specific files, documents, disks and partitions. To ensure your backups are kept up to date, you can schedule backups so they happen automatically. All Windows PC systems like Windows 11/10/8/7 are supported. If you are a server user, try server backup software.

Learn how to backup an external hard drive via AOMEI Backupper in detail below:

1. Connect the external drive to your computer and make sure it is detected. Download, install and run AOMEI Backupper. 

2. Click Backup on the left pane and select Disk Backup.

3. Click Add Disk to select the external drive as the source disk to be backed up.

4. Click the folder shaped button in the second column to select the destination path to save the image backup.

5. Click Start Backup to run the backup. Safely disconnect the drive when the backup is finished.

Notes:

• Options: you can enable email notification, choose the compression level for the backup image file and select intelligent sector backup or sector-by-sector backup.

• Schedule Backup: you can set the backup task to run automatically at fixed intervals.

• Backup Scheme: it will delete old image files automatically to save disk space for you. This feature is supported by AOMEI Backupper Professional and higher editions.

With the disk backup at hand, you can fix a corrupted external hard drive without formatting easily by performing disk restore.

Verdict

Now you know how to deal with the C drive is corrupted issue in Windows 10. To protect your drive from possible errors, you can create a backup for it with AOMEI Backupper. In addition to backup and restore functions, AOMEI Backupper also has cloning and synchronization functions. You can use it to clone your laptop hard drive and sync your local folders to Synology NAS, and more. If you happen to have these needs, download it now and try it out!