The DRevitalize application was designed to be a program that repairs bad sectors (physical defects) on popular magnetic media (hard drives and also floppy drives to some extent) by generating a special sequence of high and low signals around the physically damaged area. The surface of almost any drive can be repaired with this utility (even hard drives that were droped down or exposed to electromagnetic fields).
However, this DRevitalize (Light) version is not designed to work with modern drives having an intelligent defect management system enabled (usually any hard drive produced after 2000). Floppy disk support is purely experimental and will probably be improved in the future (2 out of 10 floppy disks can be repaired).
This utility accesses the disk via BIOS INT 13h extensions, therefore it doesn't matter whether you have a FAT16, FAT32, NTFS or any other file system installed on your drive. It will recognoze any drive that the motherboard BIOS recognizes.
Therefore it is recommended that the system BIOS be at least from 1999. DRevitalize should be run under clean DOS, although it is possible to run it in a console window under Win 9x / Me. In the latter case Windows drivers replacing real mode BIOS calls will be used.
I do not recommend running this utility under Windows (as data loss may occur if other applications are working when disk access is taking place). However, in some cases this program may prove to be more effective under Windows when it comes to defect repair.
Before proceding you should back up all your data. Damaged sectors that the utility can not read (it will try to read a damaged sector at least 2 times) WILL LOSE THEIR DATA. This is a necessary step in order to revitalize a particulair sector. But as far as I'm concerned this should not be a problem because sectors that are marked bad by the operating system do not contain data anyway.
It would be best though to run a standard recovery utility first, and then when all data is secured run the DRevitalize utility to reclaim all bad sectors. Please note that you
will have to reformat your hard drive in order to erase bad sector flags triggered by the operating system.
Modern hard disks only show bad sectors on write access when their spare sector pool has been exhausted. This means that if automatic sector reallocation was turned on when the drive surface started getting bad, those bad sectors were replaced by good sectors from the spare pool causing sector reallocation (and thus a slower access to those sectors).
This utility is not designed to work with modern hard drives having an intelligent defect management system. If the program detects such drive, in most cases it will simply force the reallocation of any bad sectors discovered until the spare pool is exhausted and auto-reallocation is turned off by the drive itself. This is a limitation of the Revitalize
(Light) version.
Requirements:
· Any 80386 or higher processor.
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· The user can now modify the repair count. It is the number of times a bad
· sector is tryed to recover. Usually a repair count of 3 is recommended
· for most situations (this is the value that the old DRevitalize 1.0 used),
· however in some situations you might want to modify this value. Selecting
· a lower repair count will speed up the whole procedure, however it may
· prove to be less effective. On the other hand, when specifying a too high
· repair count, hard drive repair might just take too much time.
· Additional midor changes.
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