HDD Regenerator and other recovery tools

[techiemon]

I need help.

I have a 6TB WB drive that for some reason is no longer working right. I am not sure what happened. I had backed up or moved about 50-60% of the files on it to another drive that I am currently using, and I am thinking my Vantex HX-4R might have done something to the drive, I don't know.

I have put the drive in the machine and in another machine is now back in the Hx-4R.

It did a checkdisk on the old machine, but... during the process, I watched it do this: delete index entry, deleting index entry $I30, recovering orphaned file. Long story short now, see photo, this is what I am facing in the photo below. H, L, N, M. L, not much there, most of the files are gone even though it says they are there. N, M I think Windows cannot recognize anymore. Even asked me to reformat. Of course I say no.

As there are quite a few items on that disk I have yet to copy over I am hoping there is a chance I can still recover them.

Has anyone tried HDD regenerator? It seems it is about 60 bucks, and quite old, but someone recommended it, I am just not sure it will work. Any suggestions at this point or am I pretty much SOL?

 

[don256us]

I haven't had to recover files in a long time but I have used freeware before that did work OK. There will never be a 100% chance that you will get anything back but there can be a good chance that you will get most everything back.

In almost every case of data recovery, you'll need a seperate drive for the recovered data to be written to. Many years ago I did make that mistake and ruined all chances of recovery. You can't recover to the drive that you are recovering from. So as you search for a program, also look for a drive that will hold all of the data ou are looking to recover.

 

[techiemon]

I haven't had to recover files in a long time but I have used freeware before that did work OK. There will never be a 100% chance that you will get anything back but there can be a good chance that you will get most everything back.

In almost every case of data recovery, you'll need a seperate drive for the recovered data to be written to. Many years ago I did make that mistake and ruined all chances of recovery. You can't recover to the drive that you are recovering from. So as you search for a program, also look for a drive that will hold all of the data ou are looking to recover.

So I forked out the 70 bucks for the HDD regenerator software, and I got H back, but it is telling me I need to plug the HDD inside the machine to a SATA port instead of the USB external I currently have it on. I am now copying H drive files to another HDD inside the external attachment I have. But I do not understand the other thing it wants me to do, to change from AHEI to IDE in the BIOS, I am not sure how to check this and make the change without effecting all my other drives that attached to this machine....

 

[don256us]

Do you mean that you put your external drive into your system and *now* it's asking to be in IDE mode? If so, my theory is that the external USB device was set to be IDE but you are right in that if you switch over from AHCI to IDE your current drives won't like it.

How does the HDD Regenerator start? Is it a boot up program? Is it like on a thumb drive or CD/DVD and start when you power on your machine? If so, consider unplugging the other drives with the machine off. Then boot into your UEFI or BIOS and set your SATA ports to IDE. Run your program and hope for the best.

 

[techiemon]

Do you mean that you put your external drive into your system and *now* it's asking to be in IDE mode? If so, my theory is that the external USB device was set to be IDE but you are right in that if you switch over from AHCI to IDE your current drives won't like it.

How does the HDD Regenerator start? Is it a boot up program? Is it like on a thumb drive or CD/DVD and start when you power on your machine? If so, consider unplugging the other drives with the machine off. Then boot into your UEFI or BIOS and set your SATA ports to IDE. Run your program and hope for the best.

Nope. Perhaps that was worded wrong. Both Broken and new new drive are in my Vantec HX-4R external HDD RAID box, it uses USB 3 connection. I don't use Raid, but that's what it can be used for. The message above reads that it wants me to put the broken drive inside my computer and attach it to a SATA port.

In addition it tells me, in the picture above that IF it is connected by AHCI, that I should change that to IDE if it is not using IDE. I am not sure what it uses. Nor how to check or change it and if it will impact any other drives or functions of drives.

Oh and it is just software, that's it. It asked me to make a bootable USB, but I see no purpose to use it because the drive in question is not my O/S, so I use Windows to do it. I am not sure what will happen if I use the bootable USB pen to be honest. In Windows I can control by their console which drive get's checked. The problem right now is that N drive cannot be recognized the system seems to think something is using N drive, but nothing is using it. So I don't know what will happen once I move the drive internally to the PC.

I suppose I could unplug everything but this drive to make the changes and then boot up using the usb drive. then once finished go back into the bios and rechange everything and plug in my old drives again, but I worry something may be messed up if I do that. If worse comes to worse, I may plug the drive back into my old machine and do that there instead of the machine I am currently using. The process takes a lot of time. It only finished about 2% in an hour, but it seems like H drive had less problems, so it was faster, I don't know, bu the other three partitions still need to be fixed.

 

[techiemon]

Ok... H drive all files recovered with HDD regeneration tool. But I ran it again internally, it fixed more problems, but I am still not able to get eveything back.

L drive file list, but nothing in the folders.

M drive, not accessible.

N drive telling me that it needs to be formatted. Honestly, I cannot remember if anything is on that disk or not.



I have tried two tools. Minitool from partition magic and another called Diskinternals. Minitool scans for recovery, but then closes, I cannot even see what happens. Diskinternals wants money to do anything. My fear is paying and getting nothing back. I took a chance with HDD regeneration as it was recommended from someone who had used it with success. Unfortunately I was only able to repair one partition with it. Any suggestions on which software I should use? Or is this just a matter of repairing partitions rather than data recovery?

 

[The_Jizzler]

Look into DD and spinrite. Dd is Linux util with some features that may help. Spinrite is paid software but has some neat tricks as well the get data back.

 

[techiemon]

Can DD run on Windows 10?


One thing also I found was that M drive is about 1.3TB, when I ran one of the programs above it said there was like 3.4TB of recoverable data and it would save it to another drive. I am like.... i already partitioned a new drive and none of them are over 1.5TB. How could my drive of 1.3TB have 3.4TB of recoverable data? I must have deleted something and it can still find it? or did it put two partitions together without asking?

I will look into Spinrite, it seems it is powerful like HDD regenerator, but another 89 bucks. I will read up on it first to see if it can fix the problems I am having. I actually think the data is there, but the sectors have been damaged and thus the system cannot read them well. HDD generator did well for one drive, but I never changed it over to IDE as they asked me to I have already run it twice.

 

[techiemon]

Spinrite has told me my HDD problems cannot be fixed by their software, they are recommending other programs like Recuva to get my data back. The problem is programs like Recuva will find even deleted files and will not retain folder structure, so everything will be mixed, that is even if it can recover it. And it will take probably at least one full day. Not sure it can recover what percentage also... They also recommended that I may need a professional to do it, which will be enormously expensive.

 

[habbajabba]

For recovery I recommend R-Studio. r-studio.com/
With rstudio you have to be careful and run it once in a session. I recovered all my pics but the names were gone and so was the folder structure. Doing it twice or more just resulted in more picture confusion. Very very few were actually corrupted and I had over 200,000. Regular files recovered fine however and it does work when a hd is unreadable EXCEPT at boot. The bios must see it even if the OS doesn't.