HDD Regenerator: Tell Me Again WHY It Doesn't Work?

[Jonny Quick]

I'm posting this in the Lounge because I suspect there may be some flaming. IDC, flame away. It's the internet, you can't hurt me.

I've been reading this forum on & off for years, and several times now I've read disparaging comments made by "experts" about software like HDD Regenerator and Spin-Rite. I've used both. I've never been able to get Spin-Rite to do anything for me, but HDD Regenerator has fixed at least 30% of the hard drives I've used it on. And a friend that owns a brick & mortar repair shop swears by Spin-Rite.

So you have me, the semi-, half-assed professional computer repair technician claiming HDD Regenerator works (I've seen it with my own two eyes and my own two hands) and another guy who is a bona-fide, 100% full-time professional computer repair technician (who swears by Spin-Rite) vs. Everyone That Disagrees With Us.

I see this so often on computer repair forums, where anecdotal evidence from credible sources is dismissed by "experts", who then gripe about non-professionals that believe in things that don't work. But I've SEEN it work. Really. Start out with a HD that won't boot the system. Run HDD Regenerator (sometimes more than once) and computer works. TA DA!! No "expert" necessary.

What I really want to know is why. I'm hoping to get a true expert that will allow the truth of the fact that HDD Regenerator actually DOES occasionally work, and then give some kind of explanation for how and why.

[HaQue]

Both don't "fix" anything.

[Keatah]

SpinRite, HDDregenerator, and DRevitalize only work in a specific situation.

[data-medics]

Here's the gist of how software like that works. I basically just scans every single sector of the hard drive. When the drive hits a sector it cant' read (a bad sector) it just keeps trying over and over to read it until it either kills the drive entirely (most likely scenario) or the drive's own built in remapping feature reallocates that sector to a new location on the platter. This same thing can be accomplished with chkdisk, so the software is an absolute waste of money in any event.

While this software may work in the sense of refurbishing a drive with a few bad sectors (the only thing it should be used for) and making the drive operate without hanging, it's not a data recovery tool. The odds are 1000x more likely that it actually ruins more data in the process. Under no circumstances has such software actually read data from an actual bad sector, it just forces the re-mapping to another blank one elsewhere on the disk (then apparently writes it in with random junk code it pulls from the PCB RAM, as per Luke's research).

Data recovery professionals like us hate this software because we see hundreds of cases where a drive which could have been recovered for a few hundred dollars becomes a $2000 nightmare or even becomes impossible because it completely destroys the data.

A better option for those who don't have pro data recovery tools, is to learn how to use a program like ddrescue (tutorial here) to clone around the bad sectors, and you'll likely get the desired results of a bootable computer far more often. Then, once you're satisfied that you have all the data, go ahead and run that stupid program to see if it'll "fix" the disk. Although you have to ask yourself what caused the bad sectors? Degraded media, a head crash, other...... so it'll most likely just fail again sooner than later.

[data-medics]

Some further reading for you: http://www.recoveryforce.com/spinrite-a ... y-program/

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

I'm posting this in the Lounge because I suspect there may be some flaming. IDC, flame away. It's the internet, you can't hurt me.

I've been reading this forum on & off for years, and several times now I've read disparaging comments made by "experts" about software like HDD Regenerator and Spin-Rite. I've used both. I've never been able to get Spin-Rite to do anything for me, but HDD Regenerator has fixed at least 30% of the hard drives I've used it on. And a friend that owns a brick & mortar repair shop swears by Spin-Rite.

So you have me, the semi-, half-assed professional computer repair technician claiming HDD Regenerator works (I've seen it with my own two eyes and my own two hands) and another guy who is a bona-fide, 100% full-time professional computer repair technician (who swears by Spin-Rite) vs. Everyone That Disagrees With Us.

I see this so often on computer repair forums, where anecdotal evidence from credible sources is dismissed by "experts", who then gripe about non-professionals that believe in things that don't work. But I've SEEN it work. Really. Start out with a HD that won't boot the system. Run HDD Regenerator (sometimes more than once) and computer works. TA DA!! No "expert" necessary.

What I really want to know is why. I'm hoping to get a true expert that will allow the truth of the fact that HDD Regenerator actually DOES occasionally work, and then give some kind of explanation for how and why.

Simple ,
Each Drive Has a Glist [ A Portion In The HDD's Special Area Called USed To Keep a Track Of Bad Sectors Of HDD ,This List Keeps On Growing As The Drives Internal Software Called Firmware Finds Bad Sectors in Media ] .Lets Assume This List Can Store Max 2048 Entries And Also Lets Assume Currently Only a Few Bad Sectors Are There in That Drive Hence In Current Glist Only Few Entries Are There . Now if There Are Bad Sectors In That Drive Media And Skipped The Eyes Of The Internal Software Called Firmware [ You Can Run The Tool You Said Without Any Issue ].It Will Mark Those Sectors As Bad in Glist And Give You a Perfect Drive .This Theory Is Only Valid When The Glist is Not So Full And The Drive Does Not Have Too Many Bad Sectors .I Use This Tool And This Does a Fantastic Job [ With The Only Clause I Said Before ] .

[craig6928]

it does not fix the hard drive all it does is remap the bad sectors
then puts it on the ignore list

so when the hard drive does boot up it does not read the bad sectors.

bad for your hard drive if you want to recovery your data.

[Keatah]

The advertising clains it re-writes sectors that were improperly written.

[lcoughey]

The advertising clains it re-writes sectors that were improperly written.

This is how a sector is remapped. It uses the drive's built in functions to remap a bad sector. The problem is, if it doesn't fully read the contents of the sector and writes anything but the original sector contents back, there is absolutely no way of going back to get the lost data from the sector after the remap. Now the big issue here is that these programs are trying to read those sectors with ECC disabled, which does not work on most modern drives. (see DeepSpar's video to understand why it won't work - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_AhZeQ ... e=youtu.be)

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that data recovery is the process of getting good data off a bad drive before it completely crashes. Ask yourself, at what point does HDD Regenerator copy a single sector from the failing drive to a known healthy drive? If it completes 99.99% and the drive completely fails, how much data have you recovered?

[syntaxerror]

or the drive's own built in remapping feature reallocates that sector to a new location on the platter. This same thing can be accomplished with chkdisk, so the software is an absolute waste of money in any event.

Sounds plausible.
However, chkdsk only exists in Windows.
JFTR, on Linux (hence this reply) you should use badblocks. But be warned, you had better have a second PC at your disposal for that, as these operations may seriously take THREE DAYS or more to complete. Non-stop. Remember, it's the terabyte era. And badblocks, once fully in-action, will hog the CPU to the fullest, too.

While the tools you've named cannot do raw-reading of a bad sector, hdparm actually CAN. (i. e. per --read-sector) However, you will have to have some shell scripting skills to read out a range of sectors, as this option will only read ONE sector. But as a matter of fact, this "dangerous" option once helped me to piece together an image which could only be retrieved in chunks (Device I/O Error after loads of GBs read with dd, so you won't want to know how long this "puzzle game" took to finish in total).
But yes, ddrescue is a fine piece of work.

[RolandJS]

SpinRite, HDDregenerator, and DRevitalize only work in a specific situation.

...and that situation is...?

[RolandJS]

"...Under no circumstances has such software actually read data from an actual bad sector, it just forces the re-mapping to another blank one elsewhere on the disk (then apparently writes it in with random junk code it pulls from the PCB RAM, as per Luke's research)..."
If this applies to MiniTool PDR, Restorer, Stellar, R-Studio; do you know if one or more of these can be pre-set to NOT attempt to read bad sectors during scans? I'm just beginning to commence to get started on learning data recovery, and would like to learn from you!

[RolandJS]

data-medic, you mentioned ddrescue -- sourceforge is very difficult for me to download from, do you have a URL you trust for downloading ddrescue EXE installs?

[Dmitri]

do you have a URL you trust for downloading ddrescue

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ddrescue/
or gddrescue package in Ubuntu

[data-medics]

data-medic, you mentioned ddrescue -- sourceforge is very difficult for me to download from, do you have a URL you trust for downloading ddrescue EXE installs?

In most linux debian builds you can simply type:

>sudo apt-get install gddrescue

and it'll install itself.

[RolandJS]

data-medic, you mentioned ddrescue -- sourceforge is very difficult for me to download from, do you have a URL you trust for downloading ddrescue EXE installs?

In most linux debian builds you can simply type:
>sudo apt-get install gddrescue
and it'll install itself.

I have a few Puppy Linux DVDs and USBs. I don't know how to create a linux debian build.
Do you have a tutorial for building that?

[RolandJS]

do you have a URL you trust for downloading ddrescue

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ddrescue/ or gddrescue package in Ubuntu

Forgot to post thanks!
Downloaded both tz and tz.sig files.