It’s difficult for us to write an unbiased HDD Regenerator review because we use it all of the time in our repair shop. It’s the single best tool out there for repairing corrupt hard drives, and we get lots of them in. That said, we’ll try to remain objective and give an honest review.
If I mention that we get on average 10 to 15 corrupt drives a week through our medium sized repair shop alone, then you’ll see why this is such a big problem. For you to decide whether it’s right for you, you first you may need to understand what happens to corrupt a hard drive and why your PC won’t start when there is corruption on the disk.
What is hard drive corruption?
Hard drive corruption happens quite often to laptop and desktop computers. This is generally because of a few things:
- The battery going completely flat (in laptops) or a sudden power cut before the system has had time to write all of its data to the hard disk
- Knocks or bumps to a laptop or desktop PC while in use
- The hard drive is mechanically failing.
The result is a hard drive that has one or more areas on it which are unreadable (known as ‘bad sectors’). These sectors may contain your data, such as documents or images, or a file that your operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac etc.) needs to read information from. If it’s a Windows file, then the whole installation is effectively rendered useless as Windows cannot start. Likewise Mac or Linux will refuse to power up. This can happen to computers, often when the power is suddenly cut or a software crash occurs. The dreaded ‘Blue Screen of Death’ can also result in drive errors.
How do I know if my hard drive has a fault or is corrupted?
Symptoms of this type of error are computers that boot so far into Windows then display a black screen. Many will restart automatically and end up ‘looping’. This is because Windows cannot find the files it requires, throws an error and your PC will restart automatically on seeing that error. Even safe mode will usually do this looping, a sure sign that you need a software tool to repair the hard drive’s bad sector errors.
The majority of hard drives with bad sectors have an incorrectly magnetized disk surface. Fortunately, there are solutions and the clever guys at Abstradrome have developed an algorithm which is used to repair damaged disk surfaces. This technology supports many types of hard disk drives and can repair damage that even low-level disk formatting can’t repair. Because of the way the repair is made, the existing information on the hard drive (e.g. your data and the important Windows files) will not be affected.
For our repair shop where we repair Linux and Mac devices as well as Windows this is simply a brilliant, cross-platform tool.
HDD Regenerator review – the features
Let’s look at the features and benefits of this software
Program features
- It can detect physical bad sectors on a hard disk drive surface.
- It is able to repair bad sectors (magnetic errors) on a hard disk surface.
- The product ignores your file system and scans the disk at physical level.
- It can be used with FAT, NTFS or any other file system
- It can read and repair unformatted or unpartitioned disks.
- Starts within Windows environment (XP/Vista/7/8/10)
- Bootable CD or USB flash drive allows the HDD Regenerator to work on a non-starting PC
This is an impressive feature set. The manufacturer also offers:
- A no-quibble 30 day money back guarantee
- Unlimited license period
- Free 1 year minor upgrades (although the software works on all drives exceptionally well)
- Large discounts on major upgrades
Main benefits
When a hard drive is damaged with bad sectors, the disk not only becomes unfit for use as there are areas which are damaged that you will ultimately write data to. You then also risk losing information you have already stored on it. HDD Regenerator REPAIRS damaged hard disks without affecting or changing existing data so it is one of only a few tools that can actually do this task. Currently we have found no products that outperform this one, so it is worth the investment.
Downloading the disk repair software
Purchase and download a copy and install it to a working Windows computer. You can then create a bootable CD, DVD or flash drive that will run on your problem computer and scan the drive for bad sectors, the most common hard drive error that we see in our workshop.
If you’re a bit confused by this, the term ‘bootable’ means that it starts up from your computer and runs WITHOUT using your hard disk drive that has Windows on it. Clever stuff!
So, the program takes about 1 minute to install and, when started, it immediately scans the disk(s) on the PC it is installed on. This is no problem if it is installed on a friend’s or family member’s PC as it will be simply carry out a very quick scan of the ‘SMART’ data on the drive. What we now need to do is to create a bootable CD to insert on the dead (or dying) PC.
Create a bootable CD, DVD or USB pen drive
Open the program from the tray icon (bottom right of the screen) or from the Programs menu’. Select the bootable flash drive or CD/DVD option. Follow the on-screen prompts until you have created your bootable medium.
Insert this bootable media into your problem computer and run a full scan and repair. It could a few hours depending on the size of the hard disk and the speed of the computer.
Can HDD Regenerator repair my hard drive?
The vast majority of damaged hard disks can be repaired by regeneration and there is a full money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied. If the first found bad sector has been successfully regenerated, it is very promising and you can generally regenerate all bad sectors on your hard drive. If the first bad sector has NOT been successfully regenerated, then you will probably need to recover your data and replace your hard disk drive as soon as possible. A few bad sectors is acceptable but more than a few and we suggest replacing the hard drive because it will fail imminently. The latest generation of SSD drives give a significant speed increase to most systems, they are relatively cheap and you can copy over your data once recovered.
Personally we would advise purchasing this tool over any others currently on the market as the success rates are so high. HDD Regenerator is available direct from the vendor here at a price we think is a bargain for the power of the software:
If you wish to add your personal experiences to this hdd regenerator review, please contact me via the site or drop a comment below.
I was given this program by someone after days of me tweeting about my H: Drive screwing up on me. I’m usually pretty good with computers and I love working on them. I’ve tried I don’t know how many programs to fix the issue and nothing really worked. That being said, I must admit, I’m already pretty amazed at HDD Regenerator. I’ve been in “Scan and Repair” mode for a little over 2 hours and… WOW! I had no idea how many bad sectors were really in my H: Drive. I’m already noticing a bit of improvement. I highly recomend this program. One of the best parts is how easy it is to figure out. My computer illiterate friends can figure out what to do very quickly. Overall, it’s just awesome. It pays for itself 10-fold when you consider the price for a new hard drive. Expect to wait for a while though, especially if you have a LOT of damaged sectors.
I have a question for PC Repair Man’s. Understanding that HDD Regenerator is effective in making a hard drive healthy by repairing bad sectors with magnetization errors, what percentage of the fixed (and now healthy) hard drives have remained without the bad sectors reappearing in a short or moderate time?
Hi Alberto. It’s a good question. You will find that if a hard drive is making strange noises then running HDD Regenerator will generally not work or will initially work and then the drive will fail later. This is normal and not a fault of the tool. A healthy drive will have a 100% success rate in our tests and sector errors do not reappear unless the user powers off the machine while the drive is writing (which is often how they appeared in the first place).
In my workshop, we look at the SMART information on the drive that tells us the drive’s health and whether there is impending failure. If you can get into Windows, then run something like the excellent free Speccy to see your SMART data:
http://www.piriform.com/speccy/download
If you can’t get into Windows then run HDTune (free) or similar from your boot environment to get your SMART info, then run HDDRegenerator.
I would like to clone a hard disk on a macine that has a windows xp home intsalled. it has some 15 MBytes of bad sectors and the cloning software will not clone If I fix with this approach, will it let it clone? The format is NTFS and Dell installed a 47MB FAT16 partition that I ignored to be able to clone the windows OS part in NTFS so I suppose the bad sectors are in the FAT16 part. Do you have this knowledge to share?
Thanks for all or any information – it is a very interesting subject at least tha got me interested since I read DISK Mysteries in 1980. In those days we had to deal directly in the FAT table byte by byte.
Cloning software usually fails at the point where it is told to read bad sectors. Some let you carry on but this is not advisable as the data may be part of the OS or your other important files.
In my workshop we run HDD regenerator to fix these bad sectors and the disk clone then completes as it should. Repairing the disk allows you to backup and clone any partition including the recovery one.
Up and running! After clicking your link to get the trial copy, I downloaded it, then created the bootable USB that your article showed me. Booted up from it and it ran for about 3 hours on my huge 2TB drive. It found 5 bad sectors and repaired them all. Rebooted into Windows and all my files are there, can’t thank you enough as they are mostly client image files for my photography job.
Now taking your advice about backing up with LiveDrive 😉
thanks man. u giving me hope. i had a same problem as yours. got same huge 2tb drive. for first time using it i though it never work coz im wait for an hour now but after i reading your comment now i know how it works. thanks a lot
Just thought I’d say a huge thank you. This worked for me after PC World ‘experts’ said the drive was too damaged. A scan of about 3 hours by HDD Regenerator automatically repaired the bad sectors on my drive & left me able to boot into Windows again and get to my college files. Many, many thanks for your help!