"Recovering and restoring" with HDD Regenerator

[Arch Stanton]

It's not a big deal

[RolandJS]

fzabkar over in hddoracle.com has a very thorough thread series concerning the very few benefits and the many drawbacks using spinrite. It may be best to religate spinrite to the ashbin of history.

[akmens]

I thought too that HDD Regenerator was able to repair sectors by "magnetisation" until 2 years ago
Of course doesn't exist such a software, the author is just a liar!

Just had to register to say my thoughts. I don't think people understand the purpose of this hdd utility. All complains that it 'writes trash' to the user data. It is NOT for data recovery nor it repairs corrupted files. It has only very specific use.

I don't claim to be hardware expert or even close but what I understand is, that it tries to "repair" marked B or bad sectors. In other words, make it usable so you can write and read data from that sector again.

I remember using hdd regenerator only once or few times. Because it does not have any other usable purpose. But here was my situation years ago with my old hdd drive. It does NOT got bad, generating S.M.A.R.T. errors, system event logs about bad drive or anything. BUT. It was very specific case, it was power loss while hdd was writing something. No problems later with the hdd and it happily served me years after. BUT - in system error scan there appeared a few hundred kb data in bad sectors... also once popular hdtune application surface scan showed B (bad) sector in full surface scan. I don't remember, perhaps it was a file that you couldn't delete anymore or read. Anyway. Windows error checker couldn't fix it. It was just marked as bad (B) sector and prohibited further reads/writes to that.

So, here comes the hdd regenerator. It's true, it cannot repair physically bad sector. But in my case it was software generated error. Perhaps, full surface format could also do the same. But not without backuping data first and it was not option for me.

Hdd generator did the trick for me. It leaved all readable data intact (so again, I don't undertand the claims about 'writing crap' to user data - if the sector is bad and unreadable, it is already lost and it DOESN'T MATTER what is written to it, zerros or other data, hdd regenerator tries to 'revive' it, NOT restore data, that was on it) and by making hdd read/write to the sector marked as (B) ,it tested the sector if it is really bad like hardware error but if not, the bad (B) marking gets removed and you are able to write/read to that place again. Which was exactly my case!

P.s. yes I know, old thread, this utility is no longer recommended (if ever) for newer drives and everything... but just came accross this accidentally and had to share my experience, that's all, sorry for that!

[Arch Stanton]

I thought too that HDD Regenerator was able to repair sectors by "magnetisation" until 2 years ago
Of course doesn't exist such a software, the author is just a liar!

Just had to register to say my thoughts. I don't think people understand the purpose of this hdd utility. All complains that it 'writes trash' to the user data. It is NOT for data recovery nor it repairs corrupted files. It has only very specific use.

I don't claim to be hardware expert or even close but what I understand is, that it tries to "repair" marked B or bad sectors. In other words, make it usable so you can write and read data from that sector again.

I remember using hdd regenerator only once or few times. Because it does not have any other usable purpose. But here was my situation years ago with my old hdd drive. It does NOT got bad, generating S.M.A.R.T. errors, system event logs about bad drive or anything. BUT. It was very specific case, it was power loss while hdd was writing something. No problems later with the hdd and it happily served me years after. BUT - in system error scan there appeared a few hundred kb data in bad sectors... also once popular hdtune application surface scan showed B (bad) sector in full surface scan. I don't remember, perhaps it was a file that you couldn't delete anymore or read. Anyway. Windows error checker couldn't fix it. It was just marked as bad (B) sector and prohibited further reads/writes to that.

So, here comes the hdd regenerator. It's true, it cannot repair physically bad sector. But in my case it was software generated error. Perhaps, full surface format could also do the same. But not without backuping data first and it was not option for me.

Hdd generator did the trick for me. It leaved all readable data intact (so again, I don't undertand the claims about 'writing crap' to user data - if the sector is bad and unreadable, it is already lost and it DOESN'T MATTER what is written to it, zerros or other data, hdd regenerator tries to 'revive' it, NOT restore data, that was on it) and by making hdd read/write to the sector marked as (B) ,it tested the sector if it is really bad like hardware error but if not, the bad (B) marking gets removed and you are able to write/read to that place again. Which was exactly my case!

P.s. yes I know, old thread, this utility is no longer recommended (if ever) for newer drives and everything... but just came accross this accidentally and had to share my experience, that's all, sorry for that!

Sigh....

[fzabkar]

Hdd generator did the trick for me. It leaved all readable data intact (so again, I don't undertand the claims about 'writing crap' to user data - if the sector is bad and unreadable, it is already lost and it DOESN'T MATTER what is written to it, zerros or other data, hdd regenerator tries to 'revive' it, NOT restore data, that was on it) and by making hdd read/write to the sector marked as (B) ,it tested the sector if it is really bad like hardware error but if not, the bad (B) marking gets removed and you are able to write/read to that place again. Which was exactly my case!

The point is that, if HDD Regenerator "restores" a bad sector with indeterminate data, then it will silently corrupt the file, or metafile, which owns that sector. You will never know that this has happened. This is not only a problem with HDD Regenerator -- some professional data recovery tools can be similarly affected. I believe it's because they use a retired ATA command, READ LONG.

See response #5 in this blog:

https://www.deepspar.com/blog/Read-Ignoring-ECC.html

[Arch Stanton]

That's an awesome thread by Frank.