HDD Regenarator Review

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, a secret none of my customers know about, one which could well get me into trouble with the Secret Guild of Long-haired computer repair guys. It’s called HDD Regenerator and I love it. In fact, it’s one of my all-time favourite programs. Thing is I’m starting to feel guilty about it, because I’ve gotten so much pleasure from it and given nothing in return and that’s why I’ve decided to devote my first ever review on this site to tell you all the sordid details of my lengthy secret love affair with a lady I call “Regen.”

As a small-town hairy computer fixit guy I get a lot of people in to me with really messed up machines, particularly XP machines, which either refuse to boot or boot very slowly and crash constantly. Sometimes it’s a virus or spyware, other times all I need is to run check disc but every so often I’ll get a PC with a damaged sector on the drive and a very distraught customer close to tears because their wedding photos/baby photos, work files, novel, MP3 collection, etc, was on the drive. Never fear – HDD regenerator is here!

Not that I tell them my little secret, of course, I just reassure them that I have a 90% success rate in recovering data from damaged drives (which is true - thanks to Regen) and that I’ll do everything in my power (which is a lie - Regen does it for me) to recover it for them. Then I fire up HDD Regenerator and let it do its thing overnight then come in the next morning and reboot the machine – et voila! – their PC is booting as normal.

After a bit of stress testing to double check the drive is ok and other basic maintenance I then charge the customer a nice fee for all my toil and trouble even though it was Regen who done all the work for me. It’s a scam really, but the customers always pay me top dollar for my services, utterly ecstatic that I somehow managed not only to save all their files, but their entire installation of Windows. Then I lie about how much hard work it was and they’re often so happy they give me a tip because I’m the hero of the day. I never tell them who really saved the day, though, the real hero, HDD Regenerator!

That said, the fact is most of the people who bring in their computers in this state are absolute novices (actually a lot of these cases, I’ve found, are due to people hitting the off switch or just yanking the plug instead of shutting down properly) and I shudder to think what they’d do if they tried to run HDD Regen themselves. Personally I would NOT recommend using this utility unless you have some degree of technical savvy and at the very least understand the basics of hard drives, how they work, their internals, file systems, sectors, etc.

As an old-school geek the lack of GUI doesn’t bother me. It’s not pretty, but then it’s not meant to be. It’s just a simple (and to me reassuringly familiar-looking) DOS-like screen; no bells, no whistles and the program does exactly what it’s supposed to do, no more, no less. Sure some might say that, at over fifty bucks US, it’s a lot of money for what is, basically, a single utility, and an ugly one at that, but then if you’ve got your whole life on your PC like all your job-related files, as well as your music, your photos, your email, addresses and favourites, etc, then it's a bargain really.