Can partitioning/formatting ruin a drive? (Long boring story)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guess Who
  • Start date Start date
G

Guess Who

I bought 2 new retail kit 7200.7 160Gig SATA drives. I had copied
everything to one of my 120 SATA drives, and put it on the 2nd SATA port,
installed the new drive on the first SATA port.

I booted the machine, went into the BIOS and it saw the entire 160Gig drive.
"Good, it will work", I thought. So I did a fresh install of Windows XP
home (pre-SP1). Upon completion, I went to the Disk Management console to
partition/format the rest of the drive, which I did. But I didn't realize
the drive was only showing as 137G in XP.

I proceeded to copy all my files to the new drive, deleted all the
partitions on the old drive. I shut down, removed the old 2nd drive,
installed the second new drive and booted to WinXP, which greeted me with a
chkdsk, and tons of error on the F: drive (the last partition - where I
copied all my backups to). It fixed a ton of errors (so I thought). I
thought I was OK. Then I tried to install SP1 so I could format my 2nd
drive, and it kept trying to create the temp files in the last partition (F)
which was also the largest. I tried twice, but each time the machine just
reboot in the process of extracting the files.

So I just rebooted and was going to create a 100GB partition on the second
drive to copy over everything and start again with the first drive. I got a
lot of bad block errors when trying to copy the files. The next reboot, the
BIOS gave me a SMART failure and said to do a backup and replace the drive.
I ran the short Seagate test, and it said my drive was fine. So I just
reformatted the first drive and installed XP again.

To make a long story a teeny bit shorter, I had to go out and but another
copy of XP with SP1 included. It installed fine and recognized both drives
at their full capacity in XP. I repartitioned and formatted what was left,
and started copying the files I needed back from my DVD backups (I did lose
some stuff - like a year's worth of email, which I hadn't gotten around to
backing up yet. But I'll live).

Anyway, once everything was done, I went to add my MP3 files to WMP9 (which
I thought survived the original copy process), and I got several errors in
the files. Each file that errored would take about a minute to start up
when clicked in explorer - but they all eventually did play. I checked the
system log and there were a few dozen bad block errors. Then a few minutes
later I got a warning about SMART FAILURE again, this time in the XP event
log.

I ran the LONG Seagate test, which failed out in about 10 minutes, said the
drive was no good. This was only 3 days after I bought it. I returned the
drive to where I bought it, with a printout of the test results, and got a
new one, which seems to work fine (fingers crossed). I ran an extended test
on both of the drives I have now, and they both passed. I keep an eye on the
event log just in case.

Now, after all this..... I merely want to know if installing and trying to
use the large hard drive with WinXP pre SP1 could have caused the drive to
fail, or was it likely just a dud from the start?
 
Guess Who said:
I bought 2 new retail kit 7200.7 160Gig SATA drives. I had copied
everything to one of my 120 SATA drives, and put it on the 2nd SATA port,
installed the new drive on the first SATA port.

I booted the machine, went into the BIOS and it saw the entire 160Gig drive.
"Good, it will work", I thought. So I did a fresh install of Windows XP
home (pre-SP1). Upon completion, I went to the Disk Management console to
partition/format the rest of the drive, which I did. But I didn't realize
the drive was only showing as 137G in XP.

I proceeded to copy all my files to the new drive, deleted all the
partitions on the old drive. I shut down, removed the old 2nd drive,
installed the second new drive and booted to WinXP, which greeted me with a
chkdsk, and tons of error on the F: drive (the last partition - where I
copied all my backups to). It fixed a ton of errors (so I thought). I
thought I was OK. Then I tried to install SP1 so I could format my 2nd
drive, and it kept trying to create the temp files in the last partition (F)
which was also the largest. I tried twice, but each time the machine just
reboot in the process of extracting the files.

So I just rebooted and was going to create a 100GB partition on the second
drive to copy over everything and start again with the first drive. I got a
lot of bad block errors when trying to copy the files. The next reboot, the
BIOS gave me a SMART failure and said to do a backup and replace the drive.
I ran the short Seagate test, and it said my drive was fine. So I just
reformatted the first drive and installed XP again.

To make a long story a teeny bit shorter, I had to go out and but another
copy of XP with SP1 included. It installed fine and recognized both drives
at their full capacity in XP. I repartitioned and formatted what was left,
and started copying the files I needed back from my DVD backups (I did lose
some stuff - like a year's worth of email, which I hadn't gotten around to
backing up yet. But I'll live).

Anyway, once everything was done, I went to add my MP3 files to WMP9 (which
I thought survived the original copy process), and I got several errors in
the files. Each file that errored would take about a minute to start up
when clicked in explorer - but they all eventually did play. I checked the
system log and there were a few dozen bad block errors. Then a few minutes
later I got a warning about SMART FAILURE again, this time in the XP event
log.

I ran the LONG Seagate test, which failed out in about 10 minutes, said the
drive was no good. This was only 3 days after I bought it. I returned the
drive to where I bought it, with a printout of the test results, and got a
new one, which seems to work fine (fingers crossed). I ran an extended test
on both of the drives I have now, and they both passed. I keep an eye on the
event log just in case.
Now, after all this..... I merely want to know if installing and trying to use
the large hard drive with WinXP pre SP1 could have caused the drive to fail,
Nope.

or was it likely just a dud from the start?

Yep, or you managed to kill it when you kicked it around the
room when you saw the initial problems with pre SP1 XP.
 
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