I went back to all posts regarding Drevitalize, saw plenty of skeptics and a couple believers, aslo saw the author of the program give his two cents. With as little sarcasm as possible, can you guys give me an honest take on what you think of the program, if it really can improve slow sector blocks?

Thanks!

I am not commenting so much on this particular software as I this is the first time I heard of it, but rather in general about such softwares.

I think there is a problem with the words used to describe such software in general. Bad sectors and media cannot be fixed per se.

Read on bad sectors and related material and you will understand.

Warning: frequently, drives in such condition are not "fixed" by running such software, as the damage may be worse than it seems. Additionally, if the data on the drive is important and do not want to lose it, it is NOT recommended to run such software. Most likely it will worsen the condition of the drive.

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Thanks, Labtech. would love to hear more opinions, but from what I have read elswhere as well, I am inclined to feel the same way. I wanted to hear from the minds in this forum what they thought. sometimes in materials I read, it's hard to differentiate between an honest opinion and someone trying to protect their repair business.

These softwares won't "fix" bad sectors any more than just running erase in MHDD will. Which is to say that sometimes sectors with UNC errors will become readable again ("fixed") after rewriting them, and sometimes they will be replaced by a good sector in the reallocation process, which also gives the appearance of being "fixed".

For an end user, a simple zerofill will accomplish all that can be reasonably accomplished. If the drive still has bad sectors after a zerofill then they're not going to get any better without some more specific intervention beyond the scope of these softwares.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

In layperson terms so that all can understand:

I have a number of of removable drives that had been subject to unstable power conditions, brown-outs, untimely disconnects from AC power. That sort of thing. Just as the disk happens to be writing to a sector, the power gets disconnected. The power dies away as the controller/heads/preamp are putting down a signal. The signal dies off and soon enough you've got a half-written sector! We can all agree this isn't a good thing.

Sometimes this would cause a bad or incomplete or corrupt sector (maybe two or three at the most) to show up in SMART data report. And then as the disk (Western Digital USB MyBooks) does its own internal "Data Life Guard" scan its internal CPU & firmware program sometimes get "stuck" on this one bad sector.

Try as it might, the internal firmware program of the disk cannot remap these sectors or do anything. The firmware has no idea how to handle a sector messed up this way. This problem usually manifests itself as the disk randomly disconnecting itself from the computer or some activity that looks like the disk is hogging Windows Explorer or USB bus - the whole shebang slows to a screeching halt. And sometimes, thousands and thousands of files can be copied, totally, safely, off the disk. All except for one or two.

Now, running HDDRegenerator or DRevitalize or SpinRite will scan the disk and correct these "mis-configured" sectors. They will put the sector back into a shape and size the firmware can once again understand. Or, the firmware will observe a lot of activity at one sector and see a lot of fails happening, and say the hell with it all and just remap from the spares store. And the disk will no longer get "hung-up" on an improperly magnetized sector. But that's it. They aren't going to magically replace missing data.

I only recommend this type of program for power-loss & brownout situations. OS'crashes and improper disconnects also apply. These are valid programs that live up to their name, but only in those situations. If you've got a disk that is failing for other reasons, then you need to take a different approach.

I can speak for this type of program, having had a number of drives displaying one or two bad sectors that seemingly locked up the file system or went offline. I have also watched some of my "Regenerated" or "Revitalized" drives over a period of years and have not seen anything go wrong with them. No increasing errors or anything. These programs are perfect for either repairing the isolated sector or forcing the drive to remap it on its own. Disk drives can do that you know! These programs sometimes will save the day when the manufacturer zero-out utility won't.

I took the liberty of making note of two damaged sectors. I wrote a file that made use the "revitalized" area. And some months later I read the file back and did a bit-by-bit comparison with the known-good reference. There was no difference!


The key points to keep in mind when using one of those three programs:

1- If your drive has hundreds of bad sectors and count is increasing, forget it.. You've got a bad disk. You need to consider other actions.

2- Do not expect these to do miracle data recovery. Despite all the hype on their homepages, they will not. Not as a pro-level service would. These merely repair a bad sector that's clogging up the firmware. And stuck firmware makes the whole disk look bad. It can slow down your USB ports, and make the system run sluggish. The disk will also disconnect from time to time, and reconnect. This is evidenced by the USB insert/remove double bong sound.

3- When scanning a suspect disk with one of these. You should only see tiny amount of errors, maybe 3 or 4 or something small like that. Better if you see no errors! And when these programs encounter an error, they will fix it in one or two tries. Anything more and you've got a whole different problem.

4- Any file that utilizes the repaired sector is to be considered suspect. Who knows what was supposed to be there?

5- If a "weak" sector happens to be used by a $Metafile or other disk structure mechanisms, there could be more corruption. You might need to rebuild parts of the filesystem. A job for pro-level work and certainly different tools.

6- When you find a bad sector, it is important to record it with pencil and paper. Then look up what file made use of that sector and consider it corrupt. Maybe you get lucky and the sector isn't in use, or it hosts a file in the recycle bin! Some filetypes are more tolerant to internal errors. A .BMP might have a few pixels out of place or the wrong shade of color. A video file might have glitch of static or pop in the audio. Still quite usable I'd say. But the .XLS spreadsheet for spacecraft course corrections and astronomical ephemerides isn't going to be working. Neither is a compressed archive, like .zip or .rar. You need to research and examine the file and make that determination. You need to do that for each affected sector. If you've got hundreds of sectors going out, you're screwed.

Now, you can begin to get an idea of when these programs are useful.

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.

Oh one more funny (to us) thing.. People do indeed try these programs on dropped disks. And they let them run for hours, grinding away.. Dropped disks are a gonner as far as I'm concerned. No consumer-style mom'n'pop software is going to fix them.

On another unrelated note. I've seen a number of external disks, for whatever reason, fail and "revert" to a RAW filesystem. And Windows tells the user the disk needs to be formatted. And the user, beginning to feel desperate about lost data, is starting to think a format is going to fix the issue! Good God!!!

Well, folks, all I gotta say is backup your stuff. And when crunch time comes you can be your very own Sunday morning data recovery engineer. With backup in hand, you'll be running in no time. Anybody can do this!

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On a clear disk you can seek forever.