HDD Regenerator on bad sectors

[eli2k]

I have a hard drive that has some bad sectors, which have been reallocated to working sectors, but the bad sectors still are there. I ran HDD Regenerator on the hard drive from within windows, but it did not detect any bad sectors. So I am wondering if I did not run it correctly, or it won't fix these bad sectors (or at least try to).

Thanks,
- Eli

 

[taltamir]

how the hell can a piece of software repair physical damage to your HDD? sounds like a scam to me. a 59.99$ scam.

 

[Rubycon]

how the hell can a piece of software repair physical damage to your HDD? sounds like a scam to me. a 59.99$ scam.

Not necessarily a scam but not a miracle worker either.

OP: This program is best run with using a boot CD with your drives set to IDE mode.

Scans will commence within Windows and produce sector maps however repairs/changes are NOT possible from within Windows.

 

[zuffy]

how the hell can a piece of software repair physical damage to your HDD? sounds like a scam to me. a 59.99$ scam.

I don't know how it works but the damn software helped me a few times. I swear by it now.

 

[COPOHawk]

How is this software different from booting to the recovery console and running chkdsk to "fix" bad sectors?

I have never used it before...but am always open to new software like this...

 

[zuffy]

Very different. It similar to SpinRite but does a much better job imo. It can "heal" the bad sectors.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have a hard drive that has some bad sectors, which have been reallocated to working sectors, but the bad sectors still are there. I ran HDD Regenerator on the hard drive from within windows, but it did not detect any bad sectors. So I am wondering if I did not run it correctly, or it won't fix these bad sectors (or at least try to).

Thanks,
- Eli

It might be possible that the sectors are marked bad in the filesystem, from when they first went bad, and then HDD regenerator remapped the bad sectors with good ones, but the filesystem still shows those sectors as bad. I'm not sure what command will cause the filesystem to re-scan for and remove bad sectors that now show as good.

 

[eli2k]

how the hell can a piece of software repair physical damage to your HDD? sounds like a scam to me. a 59.99$ scam.

Physical damage, definitely not. But the software claims many bad sectors are also due to loss of magnetization of the sector or something similar, so it does some read/write/erase function on the sector to try to fix it.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll try to run it inside DOS mode with the bootCD and see if that helps.

 

[Russwinters]

Some bad sectors are caused by failed writes to a sector; causing the ECC data not match correctly. This means that while the drive at the time THINKS it's a physical bad, it may not be.

By forcing a write to the sector (that actually completes properly)

this causes the ECC data to now match with what was last written to the sector.



For REAL bad sectors all that is happening is that a HDD has "reserve sectors" in each "zone" for the drive to use. When a bad sector is found by the drive (you shouldn't need chkdsk, the drive will find alot of the sectors on it's own) it will then remap one of these reserve sectors in it's place.

Keep in mind that this is why drives that are old slow down alot, because these reserve areas on usually at the beginning or end of a zone (see "zoned bit recording") and so in order to read the ONE remapped sector (or several depending on how bad the drive is) the HDD has to perform a SEEK operation to the reserve area, read the needed sectors, then seek BACK to the original track it was supposed to be on.

 

[Russwinters]

Also: DO NOT USE THIS TO RECOVER DATA.

if one of your heads is going bad, or the r/w channel is causing corruption, then your going to be in serious trouble if you run this.

This program is intended for recycling a drive, and that only.

 

[taltamir]

I would like to point out that when I looked it up, the program claimed to be able to recover data from bad sectors.
so "forcing a write" on it (or many writes in case of magnetization) would not be an option.

 

[eli2k]

Hey guys - the hard drive is still in working condition (~45 bad sectors, all reallocated, and accumulated over the past 5 months), and I've already mirrored the hard drive to a different one and have that running now, so I'm just seeing if I can fix up this drive, or figure out what to do with it. I'm running HDD Regenerator on it, but it doesn't seem to detect anything. If a bad sector has been reallocated, then I guess you can't detect it anymore because it has been replaced with a 'good' sector and the 'bad' sector is marked off somewhere? So it seems pretty pointless for me to even try and recover this drive, then. It's a Seagate 7200.11, maybe I'm going to run their SeaTools to see what happens and try to get warranty on it.

 

[eli2k]

Keep in mind that this is why drives that are old slow down alot, because these reserve areas on usually at the beginning or end of a zone (see "zoned bit recording") and so in order to read the ONE remapped sector (or several depending on how bad the drive is) the HDD has to perform a SEEK operation to the reserve area, read the needed sectors, then seek BACK to the original track it was supposed to be on.

That's a nifty fact to know, and it makes logical sense, thanks!