Computer program for fixing damaged hard drives - tech support wanted

I've been working on my mom's laptop for a couple of weeks now.

I think the hard drive is damaged.

I took the hard drive out today and am trying to fix it right now.

I am using an old program (from 2011) called HDD Regenerator, which by the way, won't work on my laptop, but seems to work on my desktop.

(https://alternativeto.net/software/hdd-regenerator/)

I don't know if the program will do what I want it to.

In case it doesn't, I'm curious as to what programs other people use in this situation.

I use Windows 10, so that limits what I can choose from.

So, what program do you use when you think a hard drive is damaged?

Any action you take make things worse.
What kind of damage you deal? Hardware or software?
Post here SMART report from Crystal Disk info.
Mike

I believe the problem is with hardware, which HDD Regenerator is made for.

As I said before. You only make things worse and lowering your chances to get data back.
If you really want to diy, first of it all make a sector copy of that disk with MHDD or DMDE and work on copy.
Mike

s.

1. SMART
2. Sector copy.
3. Than we can think what to do about that.

I have SpinRite.

I'll try it next, though I hope it doesn't take forever.

(HDD Regenerator is going to take about two hours for a 750GB 7200RPM hard drive.)

I’d been given a laptop that I was asked to recover as much as possible from, as the hd was getting progressively worse. Wouldn’t even boot. Quite literally, time was of the essence.

Pulled the drive, put it into an external usb box, used a linux ceedee to power up the laptop (which worked fine), then it read the now-external drive, I grabbed what I could and dumped it to a flash-thingy, and by the time it was all done, the disk was almost unreadable at all.

Get your most-important stuff first, then try a level higher to reget that and other not-as-important stuff, then another level higher to all that and not-really-important-but-nice-to-have stuff, etc., ’til the whole thing goes teats-up.

Bootable ceedees are a B’harni-send, too.

sp5it is giving you excellent advice. Take it. You asked for help and got it. Now follow his lead.

Put it in the freezer for 30 minutes and have recordable media at the ready and work quickly. It might take a few attempts, but I recovered all of my brother’s family pictures from an ’05 Sony VAIO and he was quite happy, but there wasn’t going to be a fourth attempt, things were that dire.

Chris

If the HD is failing the first thing I would do is to clone or image it immediately to another physical drive to save off as much data as possible. A clone would be an exact representation of the failing drive while an image requires you to restore it to another HD in order to access the data. You can use Macrium reflect to clone or image the bad drive.

If the HD is physically failing there’s really nothing you can to to salvage it in my opinion in my experience.

I think the hard drive is just a little bit damaged.

Last time I checked on HDD Regenerator's progress, it was about two-thirds done, and it had found one "delay."

LMAO

I have plenty of 5TB external hard drives, but I want to get a couple of 14TB or 16TB external hard drives.

Unfortunately, they are quite pricey!

I don't doubt it is great advice, but there's more than one way to skin a cat, and I'm taking a different path.

It depends if the platters are damaged, if they are okay you can carefully harvest and transplant it into a new housing but its very tedious and time consuming and I highly recommend against doing it yourself as mistakes can happen especially if you really want to recover the data.

Oh hell no…… please don’t advise people to put a drive in the freezer…. its only going to make things worse and more than likely ruin any chance a professional can recover the data if you absolutely needed it….

Hey, I didn’t just pull that out of my ass and it worked in our instance and my bro got all of his family pictures and other data off of it, so look at the scoreboard!

To be fair, the drive was toast after that, but it had been toasty for a year before that until I started hitting things with a hammer.

We’re #1, we’re #1!

Chris

HDD Regenerator is done.

Here are the results.

It found 3 delays.

I don't know if I ran the program correctly, so I don't know if the delays got fixed or not.

I am now copying data that is on the bad hard drive to a good hard drive.

I tried SpinRite, but it doesn't recognize drives attached via USB, so I couldn't run it.

I'll run HDD Regenerator again later (the right way), and then I think I'll put my mom's hard drive back in her laptop and hope I don't run into more trouble.

Okay, I did things out of order.

I should have copied the data first, then run HDD Regenerator.

I didn't have any negative consequences, but maybe I'll remember for next time.

Alright then, I don’t mean to sound like an a**hole but, if you already planned on doing what you were going to do. Why ask for help? It’s a rhetorical question really. Hope you can get what you need from you drive.

¯\