Customer Reviews

HARD DRIVE MECHANIC GOLD

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Awful is actually too nice. The product did not open or work ever. Customer and Tech service took a minimum of 5 days to respond. There is no phone number to call. I asked for my guaranteed refund in June. This is the last week of Sept. and I still have no refund. I have gotten the run around since June and very poor and slow replies to any refund questions. Numerous claims that they cannot find my records after I have sent them copies several times. Dont wast your time or money.

I am not one to write reviews but this software was so bad I just had to warn the rest of you. Situation: I was having hard drive problems and searched a search engine for a software to help me out. I paid for HARD DRIVE MECHANIC GOLD and not only didn't it work with my system, but I requested a refund within about 2 hours, and they never even RESPONDED. Bad software, and just as bad is the customer support (or lack thereof). So I can't get my money back, and the software didn't help me, but MAYBE I CAN SAVE ONE OF YOU FROM WASTING YOUR HARD EARNED FUNDS WITH THIS COMPANY". I'll never buy any software that they make again.

I ordered the software. It didn't work. It required two computers and a 3.5 floppy to use (how antiquated). The company has a guaranteed refund offer. When I requested it, I heard nothing. After several requests, I got an email promising the refund in two weeks. That was in November, it is now mid-Jan and no contact with the company. This despite repeated requests. There is no way to contact the company other than email, which it ignores. Try something else and save your time and money.

It's had to say if it works because the provided manual doesn't match the software and I'm stuck on what to do and how to use it. So only one star for lack of effort.

I first purchased a copy of this software around 2000. It has saved my data numerous times since and i have never experienced a problem with it. My primary hard drive is one I "repaired" with this software 3 years ago and it has not failed since (I had to fix the MBR).

The key is to have a proper boot-disk (whether floppy, CD or USB). However, the interface has always been a basic dos-shell GUI and you mostly have to run it with hot-keys. If you are a novice computer user, or you haven't had to repair many systems, or even face windows command-line, then you will not like this software and it will seem antiquated.

I have tried many different solutions and this product is the best one I've found to reliably recover from boot-sector errors, and to diagnose and repair failing hard drives. The interface is simple and straight forward. I've had a roughly 90% success rate over the past several years. The only reason I've ever failed to recover the hard drive with this software is because mechanical issues prevented the data recovery. At that point, short of high-dollar clean-room procedures, data recovery is limited anyway.

In all the years of using this software, my only complaint has been the lack of documentation. If you are a computer professional, you may not like the interface, but the results will speak for themselves.

I read all the bad reviews of this product, along with the few good ones, but being desperate to try to revive my crashed hard drive, I decided Hard Drive Mechanic was worth the price to take a chance on it. The program is an antiquated DOS program and is not at all intuitive. The manual is not good. It is written in poor English, is too brief and does not explain much. It tells you that have to download some boot files from other websites, and they did not all work. I was never able to make it work properly from a CD and ended up having to use floppies to boot and run it. The drive parameters had to be entered manually, and it was not obvious what the correct parameters were (the ones HDM suggested were not right and neither were the ones showing in the BIOS. I spent the better part of a week of evenings tinkering with it, and was just about to quit, when finally, the very last thing I could think of to try before I just wrote off the hard drive and gave up finally got the Hard Drive Mechanic working properly, and it did what no other program I could find even promised to do, which was to re-create the boot sector on my hard drive. It performed its magic, and the hard drive booted up and is running fine. All my programs work and all my data is fine. I am in the process of making more backups. And yes, I did have backups before, but the original got erased during an "upgrade" and the supposed backup was the drive that wouldn't work.

Contrary to what another reviewer suggested, I had already tried everything else including all the tools that come from Microsoft, including scandisk, diskcheck, fixboot etc. I had tried re-installing Windows on the hard drive (Windows said it could only do that by re-formatting the drive and erasing all existing information). The drive was not only not booting, Windows said it was not even formatted and offered to re-format it for me. I tried Gibson Spin-Rite, which I have successfully used several times in the past, but that didn't work this time. I was able to use another recovery program to extract my data files from the hard drive, but it would not re-create it as a bootable drive so all the applications would have needed to be re-installed. I had tried Ontrak, Acronis and several others. Actually, I had been working on the drive for almost a month trying all other tools I could find. I am not a computer professional, but I am a very experienced amateur, with many years of experience successfully solving similar problems. Hard Drive Mechanic was my last hope. In end, I cared very little about the deficiencies of the program because it did fix the problem.

Bottom line is, the program is crude, hard to use, requires much effort and patience, but it worked, so it was worth the price to me.