Can partitioning/formatting ruin a drive? (Long boring sto..

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" <GuessWho1.TakeThisOut@REMOVETHIShotmail.com> wrote in message news:xZidnTb9Sdik5I7dRVn-jQ@giganews.com...
 > 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.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->