I partitioned a 1TB hard drive on a Windows 7 PC by shrinking the volume that previously occupied the whole drive and creating a new second volume. All went well with two healthy volumes reported. The next day the drive started failing it's SMART test and Crystal Disk Info showed it was failing only on bad sectors, all other measures were fine.
SMART ID 05 Reallocated Sectors Count, Current 2, Worst 2, Threshold 36, Raw Value 4018
Chkdsk shows no errors, and re-formatting both volumes has not solved the problem.
Despite the simple answer (the hard drive is on it's way out), I find it hard to believe the coincidence, that it's not related to the partition, but if that had gone wrong and system files had become corrupted then chkdsk would have fixed it.
Is there any way in which a partition (let's presume it could have gone wrong) can cause a hard drive to report a failure on bad sectors where it would not have done with the un-partitioned drive?
Answer
unless the shrinking/partitioning process actually damaged sectors, rather than just encountered them, is that possible
Yes, (re)partitioning a drive will cause drive writes.
Is there any way in which a partition (let's presume it could have gone wrong) can cause a hard drive to report a failure on bad sectors where it would not have done with the un-partitioned drive
The SMART bad sector count is telling you how many bad sectors were found, and in response the drive automatically reallocated that bad sector with one of it's spares.
SMART won't start giving you and error on that metric until you've exhausted all the spare sectors.
Since it's a tipping point, it only takes one failed sector write to go from no error in SMART, to an error. As such, partitioning the drive may very well have triggered the error.
Advice: Time to backup and replace that drive before you start losing data.
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