HDD Regenrator

HDD regenerator is a commercial tool but a demo version is available which can analyse the surface damage and can fix one bad sector for free.It will be good to fix single bad sector at one pass scanning and you can use multiple pass to fix more than one bad sector.I tried to make it work in Gena and Win7PE but both shows an initialization error.

I already did a DW scan but the app freezes in PE so i can't save the Dependency Walker image. I consider to buy the app if it works under PE but so far i am unsuccessful.Any ideas?

http://www.dposoft.net/

"It does not hide bad sectors, it really restores them! "
brrrr
personal advice: do not "fix" bad sectors ;)
I had enough bad experiences about them, and recently I have bad experiences about failing disk (very old, eide ;))

If I could, I would even flag some "very slow" sectors as bad 

Well, these days, I buy new disk instead of spending my valuable time on them 

I agree with, Lancelot. If we find one bad sector, we replace the customers HD. We have tried to fix them and it never really works long. I have HDAT2, the newest and HDD regenerator, paid version and I don't use either from PE but from the dos environment.   

I agree to you both but in my line of work i daily see at least one HDD with 1 or 2 bad sectors which is under annual maintenance contract .If we are going to replace all that HDDs our firm will be bankrupt in a month

Usually i use Victoria's remap function which is very reliable and sometimes HDAT2.The drives i fixed using Victoria a year and half ago is still working and it is my favorite tool.Bad sectors up to 5 are 'fixable' (remap) in my experience.If a drive suffers more than 5 bad sectors then it should be replaced. 
     

On this case anshad,
If you like hd work longer, try to "mark" bad on many sectors near bad sectors
 (if you test you will see they r/w slow too, giving sign on next failure is them :>),
  bad sectors are like "virus" that spreads ;)

in very old days (low money), I found my solution by splitting to partitions (when possible) leaving bad sector area unpartitioned ;)
but these days, disks were small too,
now with big disks, one would not notice quickly if you unmark B , but in the end if this area is used, than it will be remarked B ;)

anyway, at that times I could not find a tool to mark B neighbour of B sector, which would be quite more safer...... 

Lancelot,can you give me more details on how to mark neighbor sectors as unusable? Is it possible to mark a specific range of sectors like LBA1000 to LBA1500 as bad area?.

anshad, I feel it should be possible,
but I could not find a tool to do that at that times and workarounded with partion (2.1 GB disk ;)) sadly this workaround not "nice" on new big disks....
If you find such a tool, let us know, I would like to add it to Gena apps 

I agree to you both but in my line of work i daily see at least one HDD with 1 or 2 bad sectors which is under annual maintenance contract .If we are going to replace all that HDDs our firm will be bankrupt in a month

I agree with that. If it's the company you work for and you have a ton of HD then yes you would go bankrupt  but from a customers stand point , it's better to replace the drive. So many time we have "fixed" bad sectors and we charge 49.95 is our basic fee and a week later HD out again and the customer doesn't understand they will have to pay again because they just paid 49.95 so since we started replacing HD with bad sectors, customers happiness has increased 100% over all. No, they are still not happy HD went bad but hey, in computers, that is life and no matter how smart you are or how fancy your HD is, it can happen to anyone at anytime.   


As for  Victoria, never used it. May give a look see  at it.

@laddanator

Usually i never fix customers HDDs and if i have to i will tell them that  this fix is not going to last long and it is only temporary.
Best part of Victoria is that you can even track slow and week sectors in its surface scanning as opposed to other tools like HDTune etc.You may be also interested in MHDD which is a very power full tool for LBA manipulation.You can find more details at  :  http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/mhdd_manual.en.html.

Thanks, anshad. I will play tomorrow with the new(new to me) tools you have posted. I have a test pc set up with a working HDd to play on with new programs. This will give me something to do tomorrow between my Gena and Win7PE SE breaks. 

For those who are not familiar with Victoria i will explain what this tool can do.It is not a magical tool which can fix physical bad sectors.Bad sectors are normal in A HDD so manufacturers came up with the idea of a reserved sector pool which can be used to replace unusable sectors.It is the job of the SMART chip to locate and remap unusable sectors but sometimes SMART may fail to detect bad sectors and we will get damaged files and\or partitions.

Victoria's remap function scans for bad sectors (by default sectors which takes more than 1000 Millie second is considered as bad) and manually replace them with good ones in sector pool.We can set the scan option to remap even 'slow' and 'week' sectors to prevent future data corruption. To do that set the default remap timeout to 500ms,then Victoria will try to remap  sectors which take more than 500 ms to read.

You can view the 'Reallocated sector count' in any SMART viewing utility and sometimes you may wonder how much bad sectors are automatically remapped by SMART.Victoria will be helpful to recover data in damaged partitions caused by less than 5 bad sectors.Run a remap scan and use check disk-hopefully you may get your data back.I did it several times and able make a lot customers happy. 

A script for use under "Other OS" would be best for this program, as you can have issues mounting drives that are going bad within Windows. I will try and creat one in my spare time.