HDD Regenarator Review

Hard Disk Regenerator Review

Submitted by soric3l on Thu, 2006-04-27 13:11.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
Help/Support: 
The lowest price: 53.95$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
Easy to use and reliable software quite unique on the market.
Cons:
Not to be used without professional supervision considering you have to perform hardware and BIOS related procedures.
Review:

HDD Regenerator is first class software, and sooner or later it will probably be considered as a major maintenance and recovery tool in the additional package that any decent OS has to offer.

My point is that HDD Regenerator utility is not meant for novices, not to mention smart teenagers or flying hackers knowing all, and damaging all I might add. They are responsible for these sort of problems in the first place, and I wouldn't trust the recovery process in a "mutilator" and ignorant hand at any cost.

Remember you not only wish to recover lost data when buying this software but also continue using the hard disk, and still be able to do a great job with it. I recommend you use this utility with extra care, and preferably under the direct supervision of a computer administrator or anyone else experienced with hardware issues.

The HDD Regenerator software does exactly what its name claims to do that is detect and repair physical BAD sectors (magnetic errors) on a hard disk drive surface. First thing you should check before running this utility is to make sure that you can boot from either CD-ROM or Floppy Drive.

HDD Regenerator offers you both options to create a regenerating bootable CD or diskette, and start the recovery process automatically. Best way to create a bootable diskette or CD is provided under Windows 98 by simply installing the software and following the steps as instructed.

Also when having installed Win98 on another healthy computer/hard disk you don't have to create any bootable diskette but go to BIOS and setup the damaged hard disk as SLAVE, and the good one (running Win98) as MASTER, and start the HDD Regenerator as any other program provided under WIN98. For all other operating systems you should create the bootable diskette/CD first by using a reliable PC with working floppy disk or CDWR. Detailed instructions for creating bootable disk are to be found with the HDD Regenerator software package.

After you start the regenerating process (quite a simple procedure) you will discover that patience is really a virtue as they say, and you will have to wait a while until the whole task is finished. Depending on your hard disk capacity and your computer speed it may take from at least 1 hour to 4-5 hours to fully recover your hard disk. Fewer bad sectors mean less time and so on.

For instance, it took me 2 hours to recover a 3GB Fujitsu HDD, and I used a good but not very powerful PC running Win98, with the MASTER/SLAVE setup described earlier. The great thing when using the HDD Regenerator utility is that they provide you with a nice option to stop the regenerating process at any time (computer may freeze, you may experience power problems or simply you get bored and need a break), and you can restart the recovery of bad sectors from the very point where you left it.

The trick is to remember the exact amount of MB already scanned and recovered, and use the OFFSET option you are prompted with when restarting the regenerating process. Do not get worried or try to reset your computer when noticing an increased CPU usage while running the regenerating process. Sometimes your damaged hard disk may have relatively large sectors with severe magnetic errors, and it takes a while to recover them.

After the recovery process is finished you will be prompted to close the utility. If you have important data on your hard disk that you want to recover and transfer the data to a CD or another disk, again try to get professional help. It is not such an easy procedure especially if you don't have a OS previously installed on your hard disk. Very important, remember that the job is not yet finished even after completing successfully with the regenerating process.

The next compulsory steps in bringing your old friend back to life are to repartition it and after that run a full formatting. Try to also run a thourough disk scan (deep scan) using the ScanDisk utility. Defragmenting the disk drives is also required if you want to do a good job. You may discover that bad sectors are still recorded in the scan summary but you may also notice that your hard disk works pretty well now, and doesn't show the old hiccups anymore.

The maker(s) of the HDD Regenerator utility say the same thing, that it is possible to still record the bad sectors, and ask users to repartition the recovered hard disk after running the regenerating process. Well, that is true and I could add that it is possible to see those bad sectors even after repartitioning and performing the good old fashioned maintenance tasks.

No reliable software, HDD Regenerator included, can perform miracles but again this one truly works and I would definitely pay for it, especially if I were to run a computer based business. You never know when it may come in handy, and save you a lot of money and efforts for recovering the lost data.

Conclusion:

In my opinion this is the only software on the market capable to really recover bad sectors on a hard disk. Mr Dmitriy Primochenko, great job and thank you!!!