It seems to be rarer and rarer that software actually works as it claims so I guess this has been a fairly lucky week for me.  Late last week Jason's laptop hard drive started to fail.  He got the critically important data off but didn't have time to get all his other media (like pictures, video, music, etc).  So he asked if I could do what I could to get that media off.

I started fairly simply by putting his old drive in an external enclosure and connecting it up to my XP machine.  XP wouldn't even mount it, it would just hang until I unplugged it.  At this point I knew this wouldn't be easy so I booted into Ubuntu to see what I would get.  Well after messing around with Ubuntu for a while I dediced to try out HDD Regenerator since Joel had heard good things about it.  Man am I glad he suggested it.

According to the HDD Regenerator site it has the ability to repair physical bad sectors on the disk using reverse magnetism.  I was skeptical to say the least but as it also promised that it would be non-destructive I didn't have much to lose.  I started it up and went home for the day (it must have taken at least 8 hours to scan the 100GB drive).  When I got in this morning it told me it was finished and had found and repaired only one bad sector.  I thought that can't be right, that it's clearly more than one bad sector that's keeping it from mounting and hanging Windows.  Well I was wrong and it was right.  The machine booted right up like nothing had ever been wrong.  I quickly plugged in an external drive and started grabbing the data off, all the while grinning ear to ear.

So thank you HDD Regenerator you make me look like a hero.  Now if only Microsoft could do the same from time to time...