HDD Regenarator Review

Before I begin, I would like to correct the name for this miracle software, which is actually " HDD Renegerator " not " HDD Regenarator " and I had already heard about it long before the time that I actually had to use it on one of my HDDs in a Raid0 setup which had broken down last month. The faulty HDD was a Maxtor, an Ultra ATA-133 7200RPM with 40 GB capacity, it was working fine until it abruptly gave up which caused my Windows XP to stall on the welcome screen and not even Safe Mode could work.

Because the PC used Raid setup, it was only natural that I suspected one of the HDDs as the culprit and I was right on the money. When I took the HDDs to another working PC and read their S.M.A.R.T values, I was surprised to find that my 4 years old Maxtor HDD had a complete zero fitness level, it didn't fell and it wasn't used that often, but oh well, what more important then was to recover my files. However from more than a decade of experience, I was very aware that a zero fitness level HDD would probably die completely in no time.

So I quickly went to search for SpinRite 6 ( a well known HDD recovery and repair software ) which I had bought to fix my sister's Laptop HDD, probably about a year ago. After rebooting the PC with my SpinRite Boot Disc, I had much confident and hope that SpinRite would be able to let me recover my files from the Maxtor HDD but to my disappointment, SpinRite refused to work on the Maxtor HDD, instead it told me that it would not try to recover the files on my Maxtor HDD because it's S.M.A.R.T values had already been tripped, what the hell!?!?!?

After some trying, I was able to trick SpinRite into submission by using a PCI IDE ATA-133 controller instead of the onboard controller, but it ran terribly slow and SpinRite just couldn't recover most bad sectors regardless of the highest level of operation that I had used, so after 2 days, I gave up on using SpinRite.

Anger aside, I decided to search the internet eagerly hoping to find a hint or two on how I'm gonna recover my important files from the broken HDD without having to send it to some strangers and then I stumbled upon HDD Regenerator again. Many people gave positive remarks for the software in the online forums but the software would cost me quite a lot too, I was not willing to pay for another software that won't work so I had doubt. However the HDD Regenerator's author was kind enough to provide a very useful information on the Website, he told the visitors to try the trial version of HDD Regenerator first which could only recover one bad sector and he added that if the trial version couldn't even recover one sector on the HDD then don't buy the software, replace the broken HDD instead, but if it could then it is very likely that the full version could fully recover the files from the HDD in question.

So with nothing to lose, I immediately downloaded and ran the trial version of the software, and it was indeed able to recover the first bad sector with no problems at all. Without another thought, I decided to buy the HDD Regenerator and I'm glad that I did, HDD Regenerator worked like a charm, it was fast and it recovered every single bad sector, about more than 5,000 of them!. Because of HDD Regenerator, I was able to login into my Windows XP again, backup the entire system and replace the faulty HDD with a new one without losing any important data.

So I would highly recommend HDD Regenerator as the best consumer tool to recover data from faulty HDD, but just a friendly advise for those who are thinking about using it, which is : The repair of bad sectors on my Maxtor HDD only lasted for a while, as soon as I had finished backing up, the bad sectors were back again, not all of them but many.

So you can recover important data easily from a faulty HDD with HDD Regenerator that's for sure, but don't count on it to fully repair your " terminally ill " HDDs.