HDD Regenarator Review
Can help... but far from perfect!
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
- The software seems to honestly try its best at finding bad sectors and register them in the internal bad sector table of the hard drive. - It does do an okay job in some cases, meaning that data can actually be recovered and hard drives can actually be used again after being "repaired" by HDDRegenarator.
- The results are *very* random... It might not find any bad sector at all when there are thousands of them for sure. - You cannot know for sure if you can use your hard drive safely afterwards. - It does not "fix" bad sectors, this is a lie. It only tells the hard drive to register those bad sector and exclude them from space to be used.
I tried this software on 2 hard drives recently. Both of them were Western Digital Caviar Green hard drives. One was 1.5TB, the other 2.0TB. They had different degrees of problem...
At first,
- The 1.5TB passed the SMART self test, passed the WD WinDLG Diag quick test, and failed the extended test with error "08-Error was detected while repairing bad sectors".
- The 2.0TB failed the SMART self test, could not finish the WD WinDLG Diag quick test, and failed the extended test with error "08-Too many bad sectors detected".
I figured I had nothing to lose trying HDDRegenarator (maybe 60 bucks?).
- On the 1.5TB, HDDRegenarator detects 300+ bad sectors, and tells me that it successfully fixed them... I'm sure it helped... But it's clearly not perfect because the WD WinDLG Diagnostic tool still cannot perform an extended test without failure. Now the the error code returned by the Western Digital tool is unknown: "08-". It still failed.
I have still been using this hard drive though, for something not too critical... And it seems okay so far I haven't encountered any corrupted files yet. It seems like HDDRegenarator did an okay job.
- On the 2.0TB, HDDRegenarator found nothing and ended correctly in the expected amount of time... So very disappointing in this case. I could still mount the hard drive on a computer and copy most of the data that was on it. But the hard drive was obviously *very* messed up (because of repeated brutal shutdowns of the computer it was in). They were obviously tons of bad sectors to repear that HDDRegenarator strangely did not see.
This hard drive ended up being replaced by WD for free...
It is worth trying using this software on a hard drive that contains important data. But don't get your hopes up too much as it might not help at all. And don't expect reusing your hard drives safely after "fixing" bad sectors.