I see an awful lot of bad press on many hardware sites about this software, but here's my bit on the subject. Almost two years ago, one of the 2 TB hard drives in my server died with errors. I replaced the drive and just for the hell of it, I ran HDD Regenerator on it. "Don't ever do this" most of the hardware sites say, "It will kill your drive for sure", but I did anyway. Why not? It was either that or throw it into the bin. It took over a day to finish and found 4 bad areas and claimed to have recovered them. Some months later, I needed another drive so I took the "repaired" one, cloned my Hackintosh to it (made a backup) and started using it. That was almost 2 years ago. The drive is still working fine. The day before yesterday one of my 1.5 TB hard drives refused to boot. I tried Spinrite 6, but it just died and refused to continue. I ran HDD Regenerator, hoping for the best, because that drive was one of the few I didn't have a backup of. It fixed 3 bad areas and enabled me to backup the drive without a problem. I have a backup now, but the drive is working perfectly again. Maybe it will die again soon, but if it's anything like the 2 TB from my server, it might last another 2 years, who knows? The bottom line is that despite all the snide remarks about this bit of software, to me, it's absolutely invaluable. IF you are daft enough (like me) not to have a backup and your hard drive dies, Give it a try. When you have 12 hard drives, it's to find space and time to backup EVERYTHING, but Murphy says that the one you DON'T backup is the one that will die!!!
one day for 2TB ? whoaa .. mine was like forever .. after that i gave up, that is why i prefer Gdrive nowadays ... no hassle for me, i lost 4tb and 2tb data because of windows drive scan all of sudden wiped out my hdd ..
I think it depends on how many bad sectors that it finds. I had one REALLY dead drive, that I tried it on, just about every sector was Bad, there were dozens of Delays marked and after a long time, it just gave up with some message about drive not repairable. So you don't mind everyone being able to "get at" the data on your GDrive (as well as Google)? GDrive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox . . . ALL are being hacked, there is ZERO privacy on these drives or "the Cloud". If you don't value your privacy it's all great. I value my privacy VERY much.
the only data in my gdrive is only sound library and movies mostly .. nothing else .. my personal data is in my computer only ..
Fully agree. You had nothing to lose. And I don't see why a utility like this should not work in a given situation. But I won't trust the drive anymore. Only once for saving the valuable data to another drive. Back in the old days when a HHDs weight was 5 kilos for a 80 MB(!) (Seagate ST4096 MFM) drive I were about to lose one drive. It began to sound funny when booting the Unix server. A few hours later I had R/W errors. Then I started a bitwise copy to another drive in a second server via a RS232 connection @ 9.600 baud. . Every once and again the old drive got hot and produces R/W erros I put it in the fridge and after a cup of coffe it worked again for another hour. This way I was able to copy the whole drive in the next 20 or so hours. We had a backup but it was 2 days old an the data has changed massively in the meantime. A 80 MB drive back then was able to hold data for ~100.000 customers. Last edited: Dec 13, 2020
For "mission critical" backups the 3-2-1 rule helps. For those that don't know this it means: Have 3 copies of your data. Have it on 2 different types of media. And finally, have 1 off-site. For the last one, I think cloud services qualify instead of physically moving tapes and whatnot.
The funny thing is that the fridge trick does work, but it's certainly a last ditch effort. I've performed this a couple of times to the shock of my coworkers
Nice if you have the money! I have 2 x HP Proliant servers, with ESX and I backup all the virtual machines every <insert critical use here> To do this I have one 6TB drive that stores the backups and a spare server that I only store backups on. (copies) I also have 3 x workstations each with 4 drives in each some are 1 TB some 1,5TB and some 2TB. I use a 6TB external USB drive to hold the backups. It's a lot of money to store backups, so I only backup critical drives. When you hit 80 and you have a pension, please give another lecture on how to store backups!
Funny, I don't remember lecturing anyone. But let me clarify myself, so what I do is figure out which of my data is something I will never want to lose, for instance personal docs an consolidated project files and recordings. Those are given the 3-2-1 treatment, which in my case is roughly a terabyte. So for myself this is simple, a 2TB external HDD and a 2TB SSD in addition to a cloud drive. For the "non-mission-critical" stuff I just use an external drive + cloud backup. I'd say this sort of scheme is not going to break anyone's bank.
HDD regenerator should be used as LAST resort. And for VERY specific errors. Last time i used it, it was on an OLD rusty HDD. And YES, HDD do rust : they are NOT vacuum sealed. MFT was screwed, locking ALL files. But only MFT was dead. There is NO point to use Spinrite/HDD regenerator if the errors are software related (virus, deleted files ...) or purely mechanical (almost dead HDD heads ...). HDD regenerator is ONLY for DEGRADED drives. Old/unused for a long time. First : create a binary copy on another drive : https://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/ Data recovery: make a copy of the damaged drive to attempt recovery on the copy Data recovery: copy a damaged hard drive and skip bad sectors It will create a "perfect" copy image, with errors included. Or try to recover errors (be careful with too much "try again") Second : IF it is a VERY old/left unused drive, use HDD regenerator/spinrite/... to regenerate it. If not, skip this step. Third : use Recuva/PhotoRec... to recover files on original. PhotoRec is amazing, but it is more complex. Love it. You can put the HDD in a fridge and/or put is "on the side" to help. If your drive is dead in the process, mount the HDD-Raw-Copy image on a working HDD and do the third step only. This is just an old fart advice, there are other ways to do things
