I currently have 780 gigabytes of data storage in my desktop, and ever since a 500gig Lacie d2 Extreme backup drive failed on me I have lived in mortal fear of trying to rebuild my file archives. For just such emergencies I keep a pretty extensive collection of data recovery tools around the house, and today I added a new weapon to the arsenal.

HDD Regenerator scans a hard drive to detect and repair bad sectors that have become damaged, but not so far gone as to be destroyed. Most competing utilities have the same feature set, but they aren't able to provide the same results consistently. My crew has recommended this software with the highest accolades, and the most common comparison has been to magic. Your sixty dollars gets a scanning application to use from within Windows, and a utility for creating a bootable floppy or CD for recovery work when the system drive is so far gone as to be unusable. It is able to scan internal and external hard drives, and can be used for disk repairs on the iPod.

The goal with this type of recovery software is to repair the integrity of the disk in order to copy the important data off as soon as possible. Though the company website claims to regenerate 60% of damaged hard drives into proper working condition, my cautious method is to:

1.) Use the utility to scan and repair the drive;
2.) Make a backup of the important data;
3.) Reformat the repaired disk;
4.) Lastly, always rescan the drive to verify that it's safe to trust.

I know that it's a long process for repairing and verifying bad sectors, but an ounce of prevention...