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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?

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    Hard to say without actually seeing the SMART data, but one possible scenario is that it has run out of extra sectors to replace sectors during the repartition (which likely accessed a whole bunch of sectors that haven't been accessed in a long time).
    – dirkt
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 16:35
  • Presumably the volume shrinking process would have to do a bit of re-allocation of data within sectors, but I'm confused as to why the drive would have passed it's threshold of bad sectors unless the shrinking/partitioning process actually damaged sectors, rather than just encountered them, is that possible?
    – Isaacson
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 16:46
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    As I said, hard to say without the SMART data (which you still haven't provided), but my guess is it encountered them, and they have already been bad for some time. Nothing you do should be able to intentionally damage sectors on a harddisk.
    – dirkt
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 17:07
  • You really need to be more specific about what attribute you are referring to, and what its value is.
    – psusi
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 18:55
  • Are the bad sector errors reported as hard or soft errors (hardware fault vs. corruption)?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 19:17

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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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  • Also, isn't it with SMART checks like a virus scanner, if a read/write error occurs, then SMART notices, so an area that is not written, SMART doesn't see it?
    – LPChip
    Commented Apr 24, 2017 at 20:39

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