can windows 7 damage hard disk

i dont if its possible. but for a few week me and some friends of mine we install windows 7.
both of my friends laptop had a hard disk perfomance 2.0 very low from what they had in vista. three days ago both of there laptop were having some errors and blue screens. and now there hard disk are destroyed. on my laptop i had a hard disk performance 4.1. today i bought a used laptop and i install windows 7. and i saw that the harddisk was 2.0 same as my friend. i check all the hard disk. and both of my friend and mine were toshiba. and on my old laptop was WD...
can anybody tell if he had the same problem with a toshiba hard disk.
is it possible that windows 7 destroyed there hard disk.

If you're talking about Disk data transfer rate, that's horrible.

Even my cheap $399.00 E-Machine has a rating of 5,7

I can't see where it would destroy the hard drives, you'd either get error messages or it just wouldn't boot up.

The only real way to tell is by fre-ormatting the hard drive and put whatever operating system you had on previously.

I've had a similar problem. I installed Win 7 RC and after a day or so started getting mem dumps and blue screens. Now, on day two the hard drive is "inaccessable" and can't even be formatted. 500GB hard drive down the drain. Thanks alot microsoft!!

I ran across a laptop that had Windows XP Pro on it. There was something wrong with the laptop scrambling the HD making it look faulty.- I suspect from overheating - After taking the drive to another computer I discovered there was nothing wrong with the drive. If you have a older computer it could be getting hotter from the new OS and scrambling the drive. This doesnt mean the drive is trash.

Well I appreciate the tip, but in my case I think that's highly unlikely. I have a very powerful system, and as such it's water-cooled. I've already tried chkdsk with it's various extensions and it found errors but failed to repair them. I will try switching out the hard drive though just to be sure.

Plain and simple:

It's not possible for an operating system to damage a hard drive.

I hope I won't have to go into the technical discussion as to why, but believe me when I say that Windows has no access to any functions that could break a drive.

Like others have said, this will just be a co-incidence that your drive no longer works - hard drives (and PSUs) generally fail faster than other components (not due to the OS), so it's not a rare thing to happen. If you try something like the UltimateBootCD it will have some tools from the drive manufacturer that will allow you to perform a long/short test and list the failures in much better detail than scandisk/chkdsk.

Try doing a sfc/scannow in the 'run' box. see what comes up.

We experienced dead hard disk soon after installing Windows 7 on our toshiba laptop. After the old driver was inaccessible (black screen), thiniking it was simply dead because of being old we got a new one. We installed it about three weeks ago, installed Windows 7 and today, the hard disk would not start. We never had this problem (for about two years) while the old hard disk was with Vista. So, "technically" possible or not, Windows 7 did damage our two hard disks.


I must add this update to my comment: my husband just discovered what the problem is. Windows 7 does not like when the laptop runs out of battery. There is a memory dump problem with Windows 7. In order to avoid this, never leave the laptop turned on and not powered to the electricity. If you do, when the laptop turns off by itself (not by user), the hard disk will not start but instead you get a black screen. If that happens, wait for a while with laptop plugged in, then turn it on. If needed, just remove the hard disk and install it again. It will recover.

Truer words were never spoken regarding an OS affecting hardware! I have NEVER heard of Windows "breaking" a hard drive.

vkaram's post is MOST informative! Windows 7 is a little finicky in a few ways, and this must be one of them!