Anyone use HDD Regenerator?

[traveler]

Anyone ever use HDD Regenerator?

SMART says I have problems with the "reallocated sector count". Some of the drive can't be read. Seems I might have no more sectors on the drive.

http://store6.esellerate.net/store/P...9923428806&pc=

Are there any other drive recovery programs?

[CrowdAds]

[polonyc2]

the built in Windows hard drive utility can't recover those missing sectors?

or what about the hard drive manufacturer's hard drive utility?

[traveler]

Originally Posted by polonyc2

the built in Windows hard drive utility can't recover those missing sectors?

or what about the hard drive manufacturer's hard drive utility?

I tried the windows utility. I checked both boxes and each box alone and then clicked Start. The box just closed and vanished from the screen. I didn't see anything else happen.

I also tried Partition Magic from a floppy. The three partitions on the bad drive show up ok there along with size of the partitions and space used and space free. But the Recover Sectors utility line was greyed out though.

The WD Diagnostics just said "SMART Error, Call WD". I have not had a chance to call them. I suspect all they would say is RMA the drive when I am interested in data recovery.

[ctal]

There are lots of them. Here are the listings at CNET Downloads, for hard drive recovery software, sorted by user rating:

hard drive recovery software downloads and reviews - CNET Downloads

I believe, though, that a reallocated sector occurs when the hdd is unable to read data (without error) that had been previously written to a particular sector, and it then essentially marks that sector as "do not use." In other words, those particular sectors physically no longer work, so data that was previously written to them is unrecoverable, at least without elaborate forensic equipment. But usually SMART will declare a failure after just a small number of sectors have been reallocated, so the great majority of the data may be recoverable (even if little or no data is readable by normal means, which may just mean that a reallocated sector affected the mft or a directory).

Trav -- Did the bios update fix your memory problems?

Regards,

-- Al

[traveler]

Thanks for the response ctal.

Haven't gotten back to the RF yet. Right before I was about to do the BIOS update on the RF, this HD problem happened on the P4P800d.

What I didn't say was the OS fried at the same moment and I had to do a Emergency Repair from the windows installation CD to even make it bootable. Then Ghost would work, then I could recover a prior OS partition image since the Emergency Repaired partition was a dog and barely ran. But at least it booted. That's when I discovered the HDD problem which occurred from my (dumb move) because I unchecked the Indexing box on that drive when the drive was nearly full. Thus the sector problem sprung up as a result of the failed un-indexing of a nearly full 500 gigabyte drive. I don't care if I lose few files. But I'd like to recover the rest. Thanks for the link. There's a few free programs there.

[traveler]

It does not look good.

Ran HDD Regenerator ... it found and repaired a bunch of bad sectors in a spot on the drive ... but no files recovered.

Tried PowerDataRecovery ... but it found no files.

Scanned with R-Studio ... it comes back with I/O device error 1117.

[ctal]

Try PC Inspector. I've seen some reports indicating that it did the trick where others did not, although I've also seen reports that it didn't work at all for a few people. Seems worth a try:

PC Inspector File Recovery - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com

-- Al

[traveler]

Thanks ctal. The reviews were not good for PC Inspector.

However, I spoke with my favorite data recovery company today. They said for me to try Data Rescue (or to pay them more than I'm willing to ), a professional recovery program. It runs from a bootable CD. No luck so far with the demo version of Data Rescue. Looks like I lost 500 gigs of downloaded DVD's. I just pulled the drive out and replaced it with an empty drive. I'll play with the drive on another computer and see what happens. I've got to get this one back to "normal".



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