HDD Regenerator actually work? At 1078 bad sectors right now

[gigahertz20]

I'm trying to fix my cousins laptop right now, he was playing online poker, got a bad beat on the river and punched his laptop (Yeah I know, real smart eh?). After that, it wouldn't boot windows anymore, it kept on coming up with a message that said windows could not communicate with a device. I stuck in a Windows Vista DVD and thought maybe I could use the repair option but after it booted the vista disc, and copied files, it would just go to a black screen and do nothing.


I booted up hirens boot CD 10.1 and ran several tests, the motherboard, memory and everything passed but the hard drive failed on everything.

So I booted up HDD Regenerator 1.71 yesterday and it's been running for around 20 hours, it's only 8.16% done and so far 1078 bad sectors have been found and recovered. For time left it says 214 hours, should I wait the week it's going to take to let it finish and see what it can do, or just install a new hard drive into it and cancel HDD Regenerator?


Also, what would you guys recommend for recovery software? He has a bunch of music and picture files he would like to try and get off.

 

[RebateMonger]

If HDD Regenerator is working directly on the hard drive, it's a very bad idea. Data recovery software should recover data to a different hard drive. Standard practice is to hook the failing disk up as a secondary disk on a working PC and recover files to the working disk.

What you are dealing with is, almost certainly, physical damage (gouges) to the heads and platters. You want to run the disk as little as possible and recover the most important data first.

If it was my disk, I'd stop the software, remove the hard drive, attach it to another PC, and run one of the many data recovery packages available that DON'T try to "repair" the disk.

Edit:
And, yeah, while you have the disk out of the laptop, might as well install a new one. No use re-installing Windows on a damaged disk.

 

[gigahertz20]

Alright thanks for the help.

 

[gbeirn]

With that many bad sectors, simply replace the drive. If the data is at all important, stop it immediately or it could cause the drive to fail quicker/less recoverable.

 

[gbeirn]

With that many bad sectors, simply replace the drive. If the data is at all important, stop it immediately or it could cause the drive to fail quicker/less recoverable.

 

[zuffy]

Interesting story. A few years back, my friend's 120GB drive failed. All his work files are in it. I tried the freezer trick but was useless. I tried EasyRecovery Pro but it would lockup when it hits a bad sector. What I did do was have a mini fan blow on the hard drive while running HDD Regenerator 1.51. This took 2-3 weeks to complete. After the hard drive was repair, I was able to run EasyRecovery Pro and recovered all of his data in a few hours. I saved him $2500 to get the data recover from the pro.

 

[zuffy]

I should add that HDD Regenerator helped me 2 other times. HDD Regenerator + EasyRecovery Pro is a great combo.

 

[RebateMonger]

Interesting story. A few years back, my friend's 120GB drive failed. All his work files are in it. I tried the freezer trick but was useless. I tried EasyRecovery Pro but it would lockup when it hits a bad sector. What I did do was have a mini fan blow on the hard drive while running HDD Regenerator 1.51. This took 2-3 weeks to complete. After the hard drive was repair, I was able to run EasyRecovery Pro and recovered all of his data in a few hours. I saved him $2500 to get the data recover from the pro.

It's hard to predict for sure what will work and what won't. But I'd exhaust the "non-writing" recovery option first. If nothing will read the disk and it's not worth sending to a professional data recovery house, you can always try HDD Regenerator, too. That sounds like the sequence that you followed.

 

[gigahertz20]

I installed a new hard drive into the laptop, ran some tests on it from hirens boot cd and everything came back ok. I also ran HDD regenerator and no bad sectors were found, I know most hard drives, even new ones, have a few bad sectors so I was surprised this new hard drive had 0.


I need to plug the old hard drive that is full of bad sectors into my desktop computer and try to recover the files. I would like to try and image the old hard drive and transfer the image to the new hard drive that I installed, but I don't know if that will work or not.


I wonder if Acronis True Image would be able to make an image of a hard drive full of bad sectors? I might have to do some googling I guess before I even spend my time to try.

 

[Old Hippie]

I wonder if Acronis True Image would be able to make an image of a hard drive full of bad sectors?

Looks like it will....

When Acronis product creates a backup archive of a partition or a disk that has bad sectors, it records the information regarding the bad sectors as well.

If you restore the backup archive, you will have these bad sectors on the new location. The sectors will not be actually bad, but they will be marked as bad in the file system, because the backup is restored without any changes.

Acronis has a 30 day free trial.

 

[RU482]

should I wait the week it's going to take to let it finish and see what it can do, or just install a new hard drive into it and cancel HDD Regenerator?

I'm willing to bet you're going to find many more bad sectors, and the test will take much longer than 214 hours