can windows 7 damage hard disk

[nearxos]

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.

 

[reghakr]

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.

 

[JPrice604]

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!!

 

[clifford_cooley]

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.

 

[JPrice604]

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.

 

[Thrax]

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.

 

[Ian]

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.

 

[olg207]

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

 

[vkaram]

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.

 

[Nibiru2012]

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.

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!

 

[catilley1092]

I've never in my 10 years of owning computers known an OS of any brand to break a hard drive. I did have a laptop that dropped critical files from a XP reinstall, but that's because the drive was about shot anyway. It failed the short and long read tests, and the SMART status was unhealthy. OS's don't break drives, drives break OS's.

 

[DarethMortuus]

Hey folks. Sorry to bring up an old thread. But, I have had this problem also.
I have a Sony Vaio VNG-FZ18G. It obviously came with windows Vista. But, it was an absolute DOG!
I got my hands on a trial version of Windows 7 and I absolutely loved it. I was devastated when the time ran out. I had to leg on for a while with the 2 hourly shutdowns, but finally I purchased a copy of my very own.

Now, I would have thought I could pop the disk in and it would just validate it as an official copy... but no. Obviously that was too hard. I had to try and do a re-install...

Guess what? No Hard disk found... righto. Booted it back up again, and it still had the problem. It couldn't find the disk.
Simply formatting the disk had destroyed it somehow. It would work as an external drive, although it was quite slow. But, put it in as the main drive and nothing. The Bios recognized it was there, but nothing more than that there was a drive connected. It didn't know the size or the brand or anything.

So... I wrote it off as something to do with it being a trial version and whacked the 320gb drive into an external case. I went and grabbed the 160gb drive that had come with the laptop, which still had Vista installed.

Plugged it in, perfect. The drive was fast, quiet and smooth.

Installed windows 7 as an upgrade... bam!

Beautiful, I'm all good.

One problem, even though I thought I had downloaded all the drivers earlier... now none of them wanted to work. Apparently, I have no video card, no USB ports, no media buttons, nothing. GREAT!

So, take 3. Sony has a downgrade to XP from Vista. Atleast I know XP is stable and I have a copy of XP from an old machine that is no longer serviceable, infact it is in many pieces .

So, I decide to install that and do the downgrade atleast I will have a working and stable machine and I can try windows 7 on my main PC, hoping it won't cause the same problems. I haven't had the balls to do that yet though...

Anyway, put in the XP disk... what do you know. HDD cannot be found >.>

Plugged the HDD into another machine to format it. It's a damaged disk. Perform repairs. Cannot repair drive...

So, after trying several different methods, several different programs and even passing the HDD to an IT mate... nothing. It's cactused.

My IT mate tells me I have done something wrong and he will give it a go. I tell him fine, but I am not paying for the HDD.

Fine he says and he throws in his own HDD. Guess what, a computer Whiz who works with these damn things every day couldn't do it either.

3 Hard drives down the drain, no more than back up drives now at best, because of windows 7.

So, can you explain to me now, how an Operating system "Cannot damage hardware"?

 

[Nibiru2012]

If the drive could be used as backup drives, they can be used as boot drives. Either the drive works or it doesn't.

If the drive(s) were being recognized in the BIOS then they're working and should be able to be used to install the OS on them.

Doing an upgrade install may cause issues where as a clean install is the most preferred route to go. Just set the DVD drive as the first bootable drive and you're good to go.

The drives may need to be completely reformatted.

 

[DarethMortuus]

Umm, Zero Filled, F-Disked and Formatted and the last one still didn't work

 

[Thrax]

I'm just going to reiterate for the record that software cannot damage a hard disk and thank the maker that the world tends not to run on empirical evidence (glad we dodged that flat earth bullet).

Here's what I see:
Someone who took an XP disk from another machine and tried to install it in another system. This will never work.
Someone who reinstalled the Vista machine that came with the drive said it worked, but it couldn't be detected when it came time to install Windows 7. Oh, hey, an AHCI drive controller issue. Find some drivers and put them on a USB stick.
Then that person decided to do an upgrade--one of the most notoriously unreliable processes in all of Windows land--and that didn't work. No surprise there, either.

What I see from you is several practices that have more reasonable explanations from (no offense intended, but I must be frank) people people who evidently know more about how PCs and their various hardware/software elements interact.

Maybe you're the victim of an unfortunate coincidence. Maybe you don't know how to load AHCI drivers. Maybe the upgrade didn't work well for you. Maybe you don't know that external USB drives are far slower than the same drives connected internally.

Whatever the reason for your troubles, know this: The software cannot force a hard disk to do anything it is not capable of doing by design, and nobody in their right damn mind would design one that could destroy itself. All Windows can do is read, write and format, and all of that is controlled by the drive's firmware, which Windows has no access to.

In fact, this whole scenario reminds me of Scott's exploration of the antarctic.

After 200 years of British sailing arriving upon the conclusion that citrus fruits (lemons) warded off scurvy, the industrial revolution made trips to North America so short that lemons were no longer needed. When it came time for Robert Scott to explore the antarctic, however, the British knew that their voyage would be long enough to need a citrus. Rather than lemons, however, Scott and his men once set sail with nothing but considerably less expensive limes harvested from the Indies... Limes with a fraction of the vitamin C content of lemons, and hardly enough to ward off scurvy.

As Scott and his men slogged through the brutal antarctic weather, they began to die of scurvy one by one. But the men back on the ship, feasting on seal and other antarctic critter rich in fatty issue and vitamin C were not dying. Scott returned to the Isles where medical science assumed that humors of the blood or some sort of contaminant in the food was the cause of scurvy, not the vitamin C deficiency in limes which we now know today.

Scott returned a second, final time to the South Pole, again with an abundance of limes and all the preparations in the world to assure that his food was exceptionally fresh, very well cooked and free of the "taint" MDs of the day said was responsible for scurvy. Sure enough, however, Scott and his men died trying to reach the South Pole due to great affliction with scurvy, fearsomely inclement weather aside.

It would be another 20 years before medical science identified and isolated Vitamin C and its role in the avoidance of scurvy.

The point of this story is to illustrate that even if all the evidence in the world supports your conclusion, it's no evidence at all of it's circumstantial or empirical. Doctors guiding the health of Scott and his men had forgotten the value of lemons and misappropriated the real cause of scurvy. They did not identify the true cause and effect, because another--entirely incorrect--model fit just as well.

Don't be those doctors. Windows cannot damage hard disks.

 

[DarethMortuus]

Yes, installing XP on another machine will never work... I'm really sorry, but i'll have to very much disagree with you on that one.

We installed the correct drivers for the hard drive from a usb, thank you. For the CD drive and the HDD, because the CD drive was refusing to boot properly initially from the windows 7 disk.

Yes, thank you btw, I know an external drive is slower than an internal drive. But, 10mb shouldn't take 25 minutes...

All I'm saying is, 3 drives is pushing coincidence...

I finally got another drive and just put it back to basics with Vista. I'll just have to live with it until I can afford to get a new laptop that comes with Windows 7 installed.

 

[Thrax]

I misread your original post. I thought you'd taken a hard disk configured with XP from one machine and put it into another without reformatting. This won't work.

I stand corrected on that front, but stand by everything else.

 

[amorfati]

I've never in my 10 years of owning computers known an OS of any brand to break a hard drive. I did have a laptop that dropped critical files from a XP reinstall, but that's because the drive was about shot anyway. It failed the short and long read tests, and the SMART status was unhealthy. OS's don't break drives, drives break OS's.

I make my own pc's since win 3 ( Dos 6.2 ) diskettes and never > never a HDD breaks, momently i have 1 notebook, 2 desktops and i'n busy with a third desktop ( 1 for server ) what a always do = full format on a XP-pc and put than the bootdisk ready for 7. Regards

 

[amorfati]

MUCH ARE CALLED, LITTLE ARE CHOSING. amen

 

[amorfati]

YEP your totaly right